


Growing Up Is Hard To Do

by DHL



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-14 23:06:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 48
Words: 44,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14779007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DHL/pseuds/DHL
Summary: Snippets of a Shadowhunter TeenhoodTantrumJaceSharing RoomThe Law is Hard, But It Is The LawMagnusDiving ChampsTrampolinesNew CoachBromanceThe Oracle At DagobahCouples TherapyJunior High PromThird WheelPremonitionsPriest's GrottoNight In The CaveSoulmatesTwo CaptainsLife As A FishMaryseDoomedHere, At The End Of All ThingsWriting Is HealingMetastasis11 MilesA Stem Cell For LasagnaParabataiWhen The Beating Of Your Heart, Echoes The Beating Of The DrumsI Want Something Just Like ThisOf Sin And The First StoneA Mother's Love IsEvolution's EndChristmas EveDo Warlocks Fear To Die?ImogenThere Was A TimeMillennium FalconToolkitTo The FutureHe Who SeeksDim Sum, Dim Sim?RelativityThe AlphaTrappedThe Joy Of MaintenancePlaying DoctorInternal AffairsPenny For Your Thoughts





	1. Tantrum

"Fine!" shouted young Alec, running up the stairs and slamming his bedroom door.

He sat up on his bed, eyes glassy with pent-up tears, and uncontrolled rage threatening to burst out at any moment now. He sat fuming and fuming, hands trembling, shaking all over, ears tuned waiting for the inevitable sound of approaching footsteps. Sure enough, he could hear the hinge creak open before the soothing presence of his mother vindicated him through his tears. 

Maryse stood motionless by the door, her hand refusing to let go of the doorknob. She looked spent, and her hair was dishevelled. 

Suddenly worried by what he'd seen, Alec went on the offensive. "Why are you doing this to me?! Everyone has it. It's not fair!"

Maryse shook her head. "You know that's not true."

Alec shot her an angry look. "Billy has it. So does Sean. Everyone's playing it! They're ganging up to play tonight! We're a team and _I have to be there_!!!" He felt like he was going to have a panic attack right then.

Maryse looked sideways, behind the half opened door. "It's only a video game, Maryse..." he could hear his father's soft, tentative voice from out the hallway.

Maryse shifted her weight. She sounded immensely vexed, but tried to keep the edge of her voice down, as if it could keep their son from hearing her. "Do you think _I want_ this, Robert? Look at you! Yes, y _ou_ take over being the parent for once, for God's sake! It's _goddamn_ Call of Duty, and it's rated Mature, 17 years and older, for heaven's sake!" 

There was a muffled reply from out the door, but Alec couldn't quite catch what that was. 

"I don't know..." heaved Maryse, holding her hands to her head. "I really don't, anymore..." She let out a great sigh, and looked again sideways over her shoulder. What she said next somehow managed to stick with Alec throughout his childhood. "No one, nobody taught us this, nobody taught us how to be a parent, Robert..."

At the time, though, all it served was to rile up Alec further. "That's _bullshit_!" he screamed. "So if I play fruit ninja today I'm gonna start slashing kitchen fruits for real???!"

Maryse looked at him, and Alec stared back, daring her to answer. But Maryse just carried on staring impassively into his eyes.

"But that's the thing, dear. We don't know for sure... Would we let you be, and gamble on the consequences, whatever it may be?" she asked aloud.

Robert was quiet on that.

And so was Alec, for once.

 

***

 


	2. Jace

When I was twelve, I suddenly had a friend. He came to us suddenly late one night, following a phone call to my father as we were about to have dinner. His whole family had tragically passed away after a monstrous fire at their dwelling, it seemed, and the boy would be living with us from now on, said father. There was no time to lay out a spare room for our guest, so mother decided that the new boy would be spending the night on a rolled-out mattress in my bedroom. 

I had never met a quieter boy than Jace was. He kept to himself for the most part, despite having the most gorgeous smile that he reserved only for special occasions, mostly in which he had to shake people's hands and introduce himself. It was way past midnight when he was portaled to the institute, but my sister and I couldn't sleep a wink wondering about our guest, our soon-to-be brother, as weird as the word felt to me then. My sister had picked out her best outfit given the ungodly hours of the night, which that year happened to be a princess, knee-length flower girl dress, which I hated on sight. I, on the other hand, had only bothered to show up in my old nightly PJs, intent on proving to all how little care I'd given to our new arrival.

Jace showed up with not a single suitcase in tow. Everything he had, all his possessions, went up in the flames, he told me in our room that night. As he was saying that, I had immediately pictured our mother, father, my sister Izzy, our rooms and all my books and arrows, the entire institute going down in a massive flame. It suddenly made me very sad, and I told him how truly very sorry I was. He looked at me with a frown, as if weighing how much to believe. I froze, fearing we had started on the wrong foot, and that he would end up hating me from then on. But the next thing I knew, he had treated me to his gorgeous smile that was normally reserved only for adults and special occasions.

Jace had to sleep in one of my spare sets of PJs that night. Mother took the next day off to take him to Macy's for some new clothes. He accepted a couple pieces of T-shirts, two pairs of jeans I think, and a decent amount of socks and undergarments. He insisted he didn't mind sharing what I had as for the rest, that is if I didn't mind, he told my mother. We still hadn't quite progressed beyond stony silences and awkward hellos when the two of us were together, you see. I don't think Jace had any friends his age before now and, knowing what I later did about how he had lived with his father, that would explain a lot about his attitude to people around him, I think. People think he was being aloof and above everyone else, but I think you just need to get past his personal guard first. 

Once you reached twelve, it suddenly wasn't cool anymore to have close guy friends, you see. Billy, Sean and I used to hole up after training and devour comic books cover to cover ever since we were seven, but now they were more interested in going to group hangouts where the cool people happen to be around, as Billy once put it. I was sure that "people" mainly include girls from our class plus our senior class. It wasn't that Jace wasn't popular. On the contrary, within a week he'd already settled in fully as a member of our institute. Girls giggled and played with their hair whenever he was around. Guys competed to have him in their group, probably for that very same reason. He was like a honeypot that led swarms of bees buzzing their way. 

He would have hockey practice all the time, or lacrosse, or basketball or something else with the team, while I sweated myself out alone by the archery range. Jace did sign me up once for the baseball team without telling me, about six months into our acquaintance. It was quite amusing, really, hearing him going on about the ins and outs of baseball and why it would be just my cup of tea, or cup of ball, to be precise. "By the way, I put your name and, well, your signature too, below mine when I signed up this morning. Try-out's tomorrow at eight, is that ok?" I lasted the whole of our middle school years taking various infield fungo and struggling to stay above the Mendoza line, mostly to keep him company.

It was almost a year after he came to live with us, amazingly, when I discovered, by chance, that he could play the piano. There was a huge storage hall at the top level of the institute, where all manners of obsolete items were stowed and put away, dating back to when the institute was first established over two centuries ago. Jace and I were sent there by Hodge to dig out historical artifacts dating back to the signing of the Downworlder's Accord. We somehow came across an old Steinway grand in there, its once shining authentic ivory keys turned all yellow by the brutal passage of time. Jace simply pulled out the bench from underneath, and started playing. 

It was music like I had never heard before. It was ethereal, yet somehow so sad and so lonely, and I distinctly remember taking one long look at his face there and then, as if for the first time, his drooping eyes focused laser-like upon the keys before him, half-wet blond mop of hair lazily framing his face. There was no trace anywhere of that winsome smile, it'd been replaced by a soft thoughtful pout of the mouth, as his shoulders swayed this way and that unselfconsciously to the flow of the music.

"It's... b-beautiful," was all I managed to say to him. "What's it called?" It was the 2nd movement from Schubert's Piano Trio, he told me. He had in fact improvised it for solo piano, and yet it was still perhaps the most haunting piece of music I had ever heard all my life. It was right there and then, I think, that I realized there was more to this boy whom I have come to call my brother, than the jock-boy that meets the eye.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 Schubert, Piano Trio Op 100, 2nd Movement

  


	3. Sharing Room

It turned out that acquiring an extra room wasn't as easy as the Lightwoods would have thought. In the end, Jace had to share living quarters with Alec for some years before finally getting his own.

But Alec had never had to share a bedroom with anyone in his entire life. True, there were some fifty other boys living down the same hallway to his left and right, but it was one thing to be sharing communal spaces like the kitchen and bathroom with other boys. It was infinitely more intimate to be sharing a _bed_ room with another person, sleeping three feet from one another and generally be in the same vicinity with one another at all hours of the day and night. 

What to wear in the bedroom, and how much to wear, was an extremely awkward matter to begin with, he quickly found. In the first couple of months of them living together, he had resorted to keeping a T-shirt on at all times of the day and night. Spring was barely around the corner and he could use the extra warmth anyway, he reasoned. Nonetheless, even with the best laid plans, they still had to have a change of clothes in the presence of the other at one time or another. It was simply ridiculous to have to walk 20 yards to the communal bathroom every single time one needed a change of clothes. There were other ways around that, for sure, such as wrapping a towel around his waist prior to a very quick change of boxer shorts, or partially hiding himself behind the wardrobe doors kept conveniently wide open, but such antics quickly became more embarrassing than the act itself. In the end, the best solution he found was to simply pull off his T-shirt or shorts as casually as he could, wherever he happened to be standing, and simply get on with the change. Jace never missed a beat when he himself or Alec did this in the midst of a conversation, and soon Alec got the hang of winging it as well. After all, if one stops making a big deal out of something, then it ceases to be a big deal.

Summer came and suddenly it was out of the question to keep a T-shirt on at all times in the blistering New York City heat. Luckily, he and Jace were by then sharing pencils, textbooks, food, money, tape, post-it notes, laptops and things all the way to some clothes. It was greatly liberating he found not to have to be fully clothed at all times, in one's own _bed_ room no less. Somehow, he and Jace had settled into a hitherto new routine of peeling off their heavy training kit as soon as they entered their sanctuary. Shorts were still worn at all times as a matter of decency and respect, but soon enough the previously jarring sight of bare arms and shoulders lost most of its shock value. He began to appreciate the camaraderie of a buddy whom he could go get lunch or dinner with at any moment's notice, or hang out and watch television or play xbox with after training, and proceed to talk to way past midnight about anything and everything, should one of them felt like doing it.

Jace was different, in those midnight talks, than what he seemed in broad daylight amongst his mates. He was actually quite sensitive and attuned to what was going on around him, which surprised Alec a little at first. Among his regular group of mates, Jace was clearly and naturally the alpha in the pack, and guys looked up to him to decide what they all should be doing this weekend, or if something or other was acceptable to them. In the pitch black night, when only the sound of each other's voices carried gently through the air, Jace would talk about his father, and about his life with his father, who was a very strict disciplinarian, almost to the point of tears. He would sometimes ask Alec what he thought of each of the mates he hung out with, and would go out of his way to keep those whom Alec disliked at arm's length. At the time, Alec only thought it was only natural that brothers look out for one another and keep each other's counsel.

 


	4. The Law is Hard, but it is the Law

Alone in his loft, Magnus replayed the scene with Alec over and over in his mind. " _You don't have any clue what I feel... so back off. This is all just a game to you, isn't it? You flirt, you laugh, you use magic, but at the end of the day, what do you risk? Even if I did feel something for you... you want me to give up my life for you? I have to do what's right for me. I could lose my family, my career, everything!_ "

There was a knock on the door. Magnus snapped out of his numbed reverie and turned around. Right away he noticed that the loft was almost totally dark. The sun had set and the light was fading, unbeknownst to him. Magnus moved about the loft, turning on a table lamp nearby and a standing lamp in the far corner, their warm, yellow glow gushing out, filling the emptiness of the room with glimmering hope. Then, he walked slowly towards the door, expectantly, heart thumping, hoping against hope.  _I will not ask again_ , he had told Alec. It hadn't been a threat or an ultimatum. It was only something he knew to be true. There would have been neither turning back nor going forward after the wedding.

He opened the door, fingers trembling slightly, then his heart sank a little. It was Izzy. "I'm here to drop off the wedding invitation," she said, stepping into the loft, even as Magnus had not invited her in. Magnus sighed. So he  _had_  decided, after all. "He could have the decency to tell me himself," he quipped, outwardly the same charming, camp, usual self. Izzy raised a questioning eyebrow, clearly confused. "What are you talking about?" she asked. "Alec doesn't know I'm inviting you. He doesn't know I'm here, in fact," she said. "So, let me first get this straight," said Magnus, studying her with his dark, assessing eyes, trying to get a feel for her. All the Lightwoods had been an enigma to him, each more opaque and unpredictable as the next. A passed down family trait, he thought, dryly. "Why in heaven are you inviting me to his wedding, Isabelle?" he asked, waving his arms above him, questioning, tempting fate.

Izzy was quiet for a moment. She looked a little sad and lost, Magnus thought. "Magnus," Izzy said, after a while. "Do you know that Alec had a dog, once?"  _What is it with Shadowhunters and their pets_ , Magnus thought. "No, I didn't. When was this?"

"A long time ago," Izzy recalled. "Before Jace came to live with us. Alec must have been about nine years old then. A stray dog had wandered onto the steps of the Institute. Alec found it sleeping outside the steps of the church that served as a facade for the Institute. It was bone thin and malnourished, golden brown in color, and a pair of eyes that could melt glaciers. It probably would have died of sickness and hunger soon. Maryse had been away that day, thankfully, so Alec asked Robert if he could keep it. Animals were never allowed in communal areas of the Institute, but Alec promised to keep Boxer, as he named him already, in his sleeping quarters. Robert must have known that nothing good could come out of this, but the look on Alec's expectant face, as if everything depended on it, must have stirred something in him, for he held his judgement and watched as Alec took the dog in and cared for him as his own."

Magnus stared, rapt in attention. Both Izzy and him were still standing in the middle of the room. There had seemed neither the time nor the need to sit. "What happened?" he asked, breathless.

"Boxer would wait in his room each day until Alec finished training. They'd play together all evening long. Sometimes I'd join them, but mostly it was just the two of them. He'd take Boxer for walks around the parks nearby. They grew close. You know, Magnus, it was perhaps then that the seeds of his parabatai bond were first sown. For a dog loves his master as no words could describe. And Alec had had the privilege, at an early age, of being the recipient of that unswerving, unflinching loyalty. When Jace arrived a few years later and they became parabatais, Alec, perhaps more than Jace at the time, had a clear sense the ideal and responsibility he wished to live up to. I think it also explains how he'd reacted with you. Alec is not a man given to half tries in matters of love, Magnus. He would love only with all his heart, or not at all. He isn't sure if you're in for the long haul, so he would rather close the shop."

Feeling a bit wronged, but realizing Izzy's intentions were good, Magnus only said, "Just tell me what happened to the dog."

"One morning," said Izzy, her voice tightening, "Just like any other morning, Alec and Boxer were strolling in a nearby park, when someone tried to mug him with a knife. There must be something about a lonely-looking boy walking alone in a secluded bush with an amiable-looking dog that hinted at an easy target. Alec hadn't brought his stele or marked any battle runes that day, but he put up a fight. He hadn't carried much money or belongings that day, in fact. It was only his sense of right that had been wronged. The man pushed him down and hovered threateningly over him, knife flashing in his hand. Boxer, the lowly dog who had been mistreated by mundanes all his life, sprang up and bit the man's arm to save Alec. Caught by surprise, the man swung his knife, stabbing Boxer in his hind leg. Boxer bit deeper into his arm. The mugger let go of the knife, brushing off Boxer, and ran off into the bushes."

"Alec brought the dog back to the Insitute, touched by its loyalty. He could have kept the incident to himself, but the honest boy he was, he wanted to tell the world what a hero that his dog had been to him. Shadowhunters young and old bent down and patted Boxer's head, tickled his stomach and muttered sweet nothings in his ears. Boxer wagged his tail more than his usual share that day. It might have been the happiest day of his life, the day he became a hero. Alec cleaned the stab wound in Boxer's hind leg with alcohol and bound it in a dressing. Boxer looked quite the hero that day."

"The next morning, in the middle of his morning classes, Alec got a summon to Maryse's office, her being the official Head of the Institute. Have a seat, she said. Alec sat down expectantly. It turned out there had been a telegram from Idris that morning. Words must have traveled fast about the dog who became an overnight hero. Many children training at the Institute had parents and relatives back in Idris' noble and political circles. The office of the Inquisitor had learnt of the matter and sent out the decree to New York. Animals that had harmed a human, Shadowhunter or mundane, had to be put down. It was written in the Codex of Law."

"Alec pleaded till his eyes reddened. Robert was called in. I was called in. Even Maryse lost a little of her coldness. Nothing could be done, she reasoned, the law is hard, but it is the law. Robert hedged, as usual. He would not oppose Maryse outright, but he heart went out to his son. He patted Alec in the shoulder, telling him it was all going to be alright. Let's just put him back out on the streets, I begged. Alec glared at me with such hatred that burned through your skin. I had meant well and had only been trying to save what left that could be saved. He still believed he could prevail in persuading the world otherwise. At Robert's urging, Maryse wrote a terse telegram, addressed directly to the Inquisitor, explaining the situation in great detail, and asking for a clarification. Not ten minutes had gone by when she got her reply. The decree stands."

"Alec missed all his classes and training that afternoon. He spent time variously in the mess hall and libraries, avoiding everyone, and didn't return to his quarters till late at night. Boxer greeted him at the door as usual, barking and scratching his paws upon the wood the moment he heard his master's footsteps approaching. Alec sat down on the floor in his room, letting his dog lick his wet, salty face over and over. He placed Boxer on his lap, stroking his golden fur. He patted him on the head, stroke the sweet spots between his eyes, just above the nose, and on the underside of his neck. After a while Boxer laid his head on Alec's forearm and heaved a contented sigh as only dogs could. They laid like this for hours. Alec sat crossed legged and hadn't moved from this position. Boxer laid next to him, fur touching skin, awake at times and dozing off at others. At midnight, as the clock tower struck twelve, Alec took Boxer into his lap, kissed the top of his head, loving hands stroking and combing the fur on his head and neck, and, looking into his expectant eyes, snapped it sideways with an eerie cracking sound."

Magnus still hadn't said a word, even as Izzy grew quiet. They looked at each other, but at the same time looking inside themselves and thinking of faraway places. "Magnus, come to the wedding. Give Alec a way out. Don't you see he's trapped?" asked Izzy. "What? And risk getting my ass kicked by those pompous Shadowhunters?" said Magnus. "To hell with your pride, Magnus. How much does he mean to you?" asked Izzy, exasperated. Magnus blinked.  _You flirt, you laugh, you use magic, but at the end of the day, what do you risk?_  "I've never felt this way about anyone," he stated as a matter of fact. "How much will you risk for him, Magnus?" insisted Izzy.

"I will be there," replied Magnus, with conviction.


	5. Magnus

Having all the time in the world does make one susceptible to daydreaming. The year _1482 A.D_. was just about the worst possible time to be plopped down into this world. So thought Magnus, by the end of the first century of his life.

Two thousand years sooner, and he would have blended comfortably among the ancient Greeks in the 5th century B.C, where might and magic were the stuff of legends and fireside tales, where _Apollo_ and _Ganymede_ were the stuff of adoration and worship. Heck, even a thousand years sooner, at the dawn of the 6th century A.D following the sack of Rome and the overthrow of _Romulus_ , the last of the Roman emperors, he would still have blended right in as court adviser or eunuch of some sort, that is in the peaceful Far East among the ancient Chinese on the brink of the _Tang Dynasty_ golden age.

But as fate would have it, he was ushered into this world in the final decades of the _Middle Ages_ , at the exact time of supreme religious piety _plus_ supreme moral piety. Witchcraft was punishable by burning at the stake, and deviant inclinations, by castration, dismemberment and burning, depending on where one lived. Even then, the damned lottery of life wasn't even done with him yet. Among all that he could be born as, a Lord, a Knight, a Monk, he was instead born the seventh son of a lowly peasant family.

And thus, from an early age of seven, he had risen up at 3 am every morning with his brothers and sisters, to begin toiling in the fields by dawn. At the start of the planting season, usually in mid-March, he might spend entire weeks hedging their field boundaries with ropes and wooden sticks. Sowing seeds was an easy favorite task that the children regularly competed for. Plowing, on the other hand, was considered too back-breaking for even peasant children, and was usually relegated to the oxen or, in desperate times, by teams of grown men.

Nearer to the yearly August harvest, long days would go by in the blink of an eye, reaping what they had sown a few months earlier, and threshing the grains from the straw, binding, thatching and haymaking. With the weather being so agreeable and food being plentiful, it had always been his favorite time of the year. What wasn't his favorite was the fact that they had to work longer hours during the summer months, continuing indoors after outdoor work ceased at dusk. Gathered together on the floor in the middle of their mudhouse, and dimly lit only by a single oil lamp at their center, he would proceed with his brothers and sisters to make their own clothes, tools and utensils using leather, wood, sheepskin and horns of the cattle.

At the tender age of fifteen, he suddenly had eyes for an older lad of sixteen whom he came across in the field. He was tall, lanky, but with tanned shoulders and pleasingly defined biceps that spoke of an entire life of working the land. The boy must have lived in one of the nearby huts bordering his own, but Magnus would never have dared to ask. Certainly not when one misstep would result in the ultimate catastrophe.

And so years passed by, until he found himself in his early twenties, burgeoning with magical energy he could barely understand. His village and family had firmly cast him out after a series of unspeakable happenings in the village. He wandered the land far and wide, alone and without a friend or shelter, surviving at times by the sheer strength of his magic when food and water were too scarce to be found. He came across a gentlemanly _Lord_ , who was hiding that very same warlock abilities just as he had done. He took pity on the young boy and took him in, teaching him bit by bit the means to control that immense power boiling inside and, most importantly, to hide it from the unforgiving world outside. 

On the night of his twenty-second birthday, just as he stepped out half tipsy from the pub celebration the villagers had thrown on his behalf, _Young Master_ they had gotten used to calling him of late, he laid eyes on Imasu for the very first time, sulking by the entrance of the inn, half in envy, and perhaps half in infatuation. He could still remember every detail of that magical night and the days that followed soon after. Everything was unforgettable, as first love usually is. Be it a stolen kiss in the utter darkness outside the mansion that first night they met, neither boy having enough courage to put each's own attraction into words, instead letting the action do the talking. Or the first time Imasu had dared to call him his boyfriend out of a sudden, weeks later by the secluded lake not far from the mansion.

He tried to convince his Lord to take his dear friend in as his dependent, bracing himself for a tough argument. Instead, other than a meaningful raise of an eyebrow and a searching, wondering gaze into his eyes, the Lord summarily nodded his approval and retreated without a word to his personal quarters. Perhaps it was the late generosity of a man who had lived by himself all his life and regretted it afterwards, being so afraid of revealing who he truly was, thought Magnus years later.

Five full decades they explored the annals of love and the alleys of commitment. They traveled the continent and were never again the same for the experience. They tasted different cuisines and absorbed different languages, staying a year in Morocco, another year in Cadiz, then a couple of years in Delphi making a living as oracles, and a good fifteen years as scribes in the court of King Arthur. It hadn't been without its challenges, their life together, as all precious things in the world must be. But they persevered. Even as one stayed forever young like an immortal rose, while the other withered with the passing of time, they persevered. What potions-making prowess Magnus was famous for later in his life was gleaned in those final, terrible years when he had tried his utmost at any and all mantras or tinctures to save his dying partner. In the end, time still would not wait for no man. 

He spent years grieving, certain that he could never love again. It felt like the ultimate betrayal of his beloved, if he were to move on from their lifetime of shared memories. He felt like a widow, bereaved and veiled, who would rather wait for death alone by herself than dally with another man. Years passed. Time healed even the deepest of wounds. Alas, he could not die, nor could he age, forever blessed with the body of a young lad. The Renaissance had arrived in full swing by now, and attitudes were changing by the year. Freedom, of art, of mind, of fashion, of love, was starting to be a thing to be celebrated for, not hated. One moonlit night by the quay where a band of Gypsies skillfully entertained rowdy diners, he met Anselm.

Despite himself, he could feel the familiar old feelings of burgeoning love overtaking him whenever he thought of Anselm. And yet, it was different this time. He questioned his feelings over and over. Because this did not feel the same. He wasn't feeling that familiar sense of desperation, counting the hours and minutes until they could be together again. He didn't feel he was going to die if he didn't see Anselm today. He didn't feel his heart would burst out of love he had for him. He wondered if he truly loved Anselm.

After much much soul-searching, he finally came to the conclusion that it wasn't possible for this love to feel the same as that first love. He was much younger then. He was carefree, everything was new and exciting then. They were both young and green. They had no one else but each other. And the future seemed limitless and anything was possible. How could this love be the same, he thought. And yet, to quote the wisdom of a famed pop sensation he later met in the 1960s, "Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before, though I know I'll often stop and think about them, in my life, I'll love you more."

At around the same time too he realized, that this would always be what fate had in store for him. The curse of immortality, of forever outliving the living, and of always having to start all over again. 

 

 

 ***

 


	6. Diving Champs

The summer I turned fifteen, I earned a dubious spot on the NY'Stute Stingrays Swim & Dive Team, ostensibly to top off Jace's brilliance (much like a confetti) in the ten-meter synchro dive, which no other kids in our Institute had dared to take up. You see, by some heavenly grace of the most peculiar sort, Jace had suddenly demonstrated a spontaneous, uncanny aptitude for doing reverse 2 ½ somersaults while free-falling down at the speed of forty miles per hour into deep water. That's more than enough speed if mishandled to break bones and dislocate joints, mind you.

Ms. Olsen, our portly, gray-haired swimming instructor who had been instructing us New York Stute kids since God knows when, had gasped and covered her mouth, muttering " _My goodness!_ " many times over, as she saw Jace flopping down like a spinning ball down the ten-meter platform, on his first ever try. She had pronounced him a natural -  a _genius_ \- there and then, much like Mozart, who composed Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when he was merely four years old. Which wasn't actually quite _true_ , by the way. 

But Jace was as true and blue as the NY'Stute Stingrays Swim & Dive could have hoped for in that year's annual Inter-Institute Diving Championship. The only problem being that, an opening to be his partner for the synchro dive, which required two divers to perform the same set of dives simultaneously side by side, went unfilled for a week and then two and then, God forbid, three. Ms. Olsen began to fret, and later to  _soliloquize_  about missed chances and untapped genius.

Jace himself, on the other hand, began to take diving very seriously, more seriously in fact than he had taken any other sports before then. Diving was really in fact a delicate mix of arts and sports, he confided to me late one night. It required practice, perfection and execution, all the things that were among Jace's strong suits especially. But it also required an artistic sense of beauty, of form and, in the case of synchro dives, a very deep and personal collaboration between two equal partners. He grew more desperate day after day, as it became clear that, chances were the season would be over before a suitable candidate could be found to synchro up with him.

One late friday afternoon, on the final registration day for the annual Championship, he basically dragged me up five flights of stairs into Ms. Olsen's office on the Institute's fifth floor, linking his arms on mine, and told her in no uncertain terms, that I would be his synchro partner. Ms. Olsen was ostensibly pleased, although I did notice her glancing at me and then blinking and muttering to herself now and again, as if weighing me up to see if I indeed had the beef to stand toe to toe with her precious little Mozart. Jace was insistent, however, bragging that since he and I were practically brothers, he would do all and everything it takes to get me up to speed within the three months we had leading to the Championship.

And thus, my improbable Diving Championship season with Jace commenced. It was hard as fuck, to be honest. It was so damn ridiculously tough I had no idea, to think every single one of those gold medalists, silver, bronze, and even those spectacular washouts in every Olympic games, to think that every single one of them had gone through this regime of training for four up to eight years of their lives leading up to that _mere_ 5 minutes of live telecast. I never could quite see those athletes, winners or losers, the same way again after that summer Jace and I trained as competitive athletes. And yet in the end, despite all the hardships we had to endure, I believe Jace and I came out all the stronger for it. For no better way of putting it, that summer I turned fifteen was truly the best of times, and it was the worst of times, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, and we had nothing before us.

 

 

*** To Be Continued ***

 

  

 

 


	7. Trampolines

I had a bad feeling as soon as we arrived in the Championship Village, secluded high up in the mountains north of Alicante. Five hundred odd athletes from fifty different institutes around the world, speaking as many different dialects as there were sporting events, and still everyone seemed to know everyone else, not to mention everyone else’s business from the get-go. 

Fist bumps, high fives, and even occasional air kisses were the greetings of choice from the very first day, intermingled with veiled taunts such as _hope your balls feel better,_ or craftier ones like, _see we got the 4 ½ so in the bag y’all ain’t ever gonna catch up, might well pack yer bags now and follow us on twitter_ , which got Jace giggling despite the two of us stranded alone awkwardly in the middle of the room. Not five minutes into the initial “ice-breaker”, everybody but us was firmly in position by their respective cliques.

The annual Championship was mapped out to take up the entire summer, starting with ten weeks of full hard training and culminating in two final weeks of competition. Jace and I had eleven dives to learn in that span of time, for the very first time, with every other team having had their numbers all sorted out way back in the months and years prior.

To my dismay, we didn’t even get to touch any water on our first day there. Or the next, or the day after next. It was pure dryland training on the trampoline, mostly myself working out the prescribed recipe of twists, somersaults and whatnots in slow motion, while wearing a spotting belt, and Jace ever patiently holding the spotting rope that suspended me in midair for any length of time I needed to complete each painful maneuver.

Jace himself needn’t practise much at all, as I might have mentioned somewhere, him being a favorite of the gods in so many ways. And yet he stood steadfast by me - my dependable Jace - hour after hour, day after day, long after the other teams had abandoned the gymnasium late each evening, each group of them sniggering, _tsk-tsk_ ing and generally laughing their heads off as they passed us and saw me contorting ignobly like a pretzel in the air.

It took me three weeks just to get the first dive under my belt, a forward 1 ½ somersault in the tuck position, which was already one of the easiest dives there was. I couldn’t sleep that night, and not for joy, but for an overwhelming, impending sense of doom that I had attempted the impossible. I had bitten off far more than I could chew this time, I would end up letting my best mate down when he needed me most, and he would forever think less of me as a result. I panicked. Hours later, seeing no way out, I woke Jace up in the darkness sprawling on the bed next to mine, grabbing, shaking his arm uncontrollably at three in the morning, sobbing and telling him to forgo our synchro altogether, compete in the solo category instead.

Jace listened and listened some more, but he didn’t utter a word. I cried and cried spilling my heart’s content, him my confessor. When I ran out of words in the end, instead he took me in for a hug. It was the first time we had really hugged, beyond the usual _bro-grab_ kids do at our age, and it felt good. It felt really good. It calmed me down and pulled me back from the brink. We stayed like that for sometime. It was completely dark and all I could feel was his sheltering arms around my shoulders and his collarbones cushioning my eyes. I began to feel embarrassed, like I had irreparably emasculated myself in front of my best mate who was closer than a brother to me. But Jace made no move to extricate himself, and all was fine once more.

“Listen, Alec...”, finally he said in a very low voice close to my ear. “Listen, we’ve seven weeks to go. We’ll do the best we can with that, you and I. But know that, hey listen, know this Alec, I can’t drop you in the end anymore than I can quit being me. You understand?” Slowly, taken aback and still trying to digest what was it indeed that he had said to me, I nodded, and felt him nodding back. We were both silent for a moment. “It’s all cool,” he said with some lightness, sensing my embarrassment creeping back. “Get some sleep, we train first thing in the morning. Kay?” he said in no more than a whisper, perhaps making it all the more heartfelt to me.

I overslept the next morning, to be sure. It was the late morning sun shining through the matted curtain that woke me up. My eyes felt strangely dry, and it took me a moment to get a bearing of myself. My body ached all over, but I summoned my strength and sat up in bed, only then realising that Jace was sitting up right across me on his bed, grinning widely. “Attaboy!” he exclaimed, with a new strange familiarity that wasn’t there before, not even with us two having shared a bedroom and woken up next to each other countless times in the past three years.

I decidedly felt better, handily slipped on my tee and gym shorts and shoes, and headed back for the gym and the trampolines, Jace by my side.

 

***

 

 


	8. New Coach

Jace must have gotten busy while I slept that morning, for a fire message came for us that same afternoon. It was Ms. Olsen. " _Dear boys, my sincerest apologies for not being up there with you two,_ " it said. " _Given my ripe age and weight (yes), I am afraid my being there might prove more of a hindrance than help to you both._ " How thoughtful of her, I thought. " _Nonetheless, I contacted an old colleague of mine. He's up in years and quite past his prime, truth be told, but hopefully he might still be of some value to you. So fingers crossed, boys. - Ms. Olsen, M.Ed, Ph.D._ " How very kind of her.

Well, what Ms. Olsen conveniently forgot to mention to us, was that our messiah turned out to be a mere  _mundane_ , of all things. Oh he was a nice, very friendly sort of elderly folk, no question about it, but he had sad eyes, probably a ton of emotional baggage and a depression-inducing aura about him. The last two were entirely Jace's conjecture and his Sherlock-ing. We put him at no _less_ than sixty mundane years, tops. He greeted us with a sad smile, apologizing that he had not been diving as much as he probably should lately. He asked for each of our names, smiled sadly as he pointed and repeated " _Jace, Alec, Jace, Alec"_  a couple times, then forgot to introduce himself in return.

He remembered though to ask to see Jace's dive on the platform and, as Jace pulled off a near perfect rip-entry into the water, it was also the first time I think I saw him to be genuinely at peace. He thanked Jace, oddly enough, as Jace stepped out of the water a little too cockily, but offered no advice or critique whatsoever, immediately turning to me asking if I would be so kind as to go next. God help us if this grandpa could win us the Championship, I thought. 

But I showed him my one and only dive anyway, abashed like a pianist who could only play one song. This time he smiled encouragingly at me, and wondered if perhaps I would be willing to work on some take-off footwork with him later on. What really struck me the most was the complete absence of condescension whatsoever in his countenance, in stark contrast to everyone else who had seen me dive this past month. At the very least we have a coach who would cradle us and let me down gently, I thought.

Later on, he asked if he could see Jace's set-list of eleven dives, making timid suggestions here and there if Jace would be willing to change some parts, or bring down the number of somersaults and twists, for my sake. Jace looked at him impassively for some time, then asked if the old man would demonstrate for us any particular dive himself in return. The tension was palpable in the air. I tried to interject, wondering a little loudly if our super-tight trunks would fit our dear coach. Grandpa laughed appreciatively at me. "It's alright, thank you, that's a fair enough request," he smiled sadly. And so we waited, somewhat _gleefully_ I must say, as he peeled off his t-shirt and went tiredly up the stairs leading to the 10 meter platform, still in his track pants. 

Having stopped to catch a couple of deep breaths by the top of the stairs, he seemed to gain more confidence as he stepped closer to the edge of the platform. Then he stood there completely still for quite a while and, just as Jace was half whispering "uh-oh maybe he had a heart attack" into my ears, came down hard with a flying forward one-and-a-half somersault pike into the water below. I turned and was about to tell Jace "woot, at least he still has some chops left in him". But Jace had suddenly sprang up and was clapping very excitedly at him, like a standing ovation. I had no idea it was _that_ breathtaking a plop into the water, but I had to admit also that my instincts weren't exactly the sharpest in these waters, and so I decided to trust Jace completely in his glowing assessment.

Now Jace had completely turned against me on matters of training from that moment on. He sided with grandpa so completely and so congruently on all affairs pertaining to my "training" I felt like a baby all over again, small and strapped helplessly in midair as mom and dad stood by and openly discussed proper potty training like nobody's business. But deep down I must have felt myself improving, for I didn't protest one bit whenever grandpa asked so very politely if I would care to do a few more hours of footwork training in the evening, or if Jace stood gently right behind me on the trampoline and placed his palms tightly on either sides of my waist, to aid me, and to give me some small measure of stability and comfort in lieu of the bruising spotting belt. 

"I think he's gay," announced Jace out of the blue during our lunch in the cafeteria, a few days before the start of the competition. I winced, and stared doubly hard into my sandwich noticing the coarse grains of sesame seeds on its topside, green lettuce leaves poking out playfully on all sides. "Really?" I said. " _Definitely!_ See, I asked him this morning how old are his children now, and he replied no he didn't have any, he used to be with someone but then he left some years back. _He_ , he said!" I grunted and said it was none of our business anyhow. But then Jace took hold of my forearm and said, "And you know what? He then asked me if the two of us, if you and me... you know?" 

I jerked my arm away as if he was poison. "Of course not!" I spat, glaring at him furiously. But Jace was unperturbed. He looked hard at me. "I don't know, Alec," he said, refusing to letting my eyes go. "Sometimes I almost think we're so tight, we're more than mates." I didn't know that to say, so I said nothing back. "You know what I mean, right?" he pressed on. I nodded, our eyes still locked.

The rest of our days were nothing more than a blur to me from then on. I wouldn't say we expected it, but we weren't surprised either when our two names came up on top of the scoreboard during the finals the following week. Teams who had laughed at us and made fun of the pretzel I was now came by to sit with us at every lunch and every dinner, hoping to pry the secret of our success.

But the saddest thing for us happened the afternoon of the closing ceremony, right after medals were awarded. We had just taken a photo of the three of us together, grandpa smiling sadly in between two jubilant, gold-medal toting boys. He had to return to the mundane world right away, he said. Oh please do stay with us for the celebration afterwards, we begged. But he shook his head, and said no. We pestered and pestered, until he relented at last, and told us his secret. He was positive of HIV and would have no place in a booze filled party full of boisterous young men.

That was the last that either of us ever saw of him again. But I did have that single photo of the three of us together framed on my bedstand, where it still is standing now. A few months after our win, as we were packing up our sports gear on the last day of the academic year, I came across Ms. Olsen locking up her office, a big box of momentos in her arms. She was retiring that year. Jace and I helped to carry her box downstairs, and, fearing that I would never have the chance again, I asked her who was it that she had sent to help us during the Championship. "Why," she said, "that's only Greg Louganis, who won four Olympic gold medals in the eighties. I got to know him during the Olympics back in 1988." She sighed, having reached her vehicle at last. "The greatest American diver, and probably the greatest diver in history."

 

 

 

***

 

 

 

Greg Louganis, four-times Olympic Gold Medalist 

 


	9. Bromance

I remember once having to read up on the _Kinsey Scale_  for sociology, taught by Ms. Caroline. A sudden epiphany had come to me then, that if Kinsey were to somehow step off the page and pull out his scale to measure Jace, his results would probably be _straight_ off the charts. But to be perfectly honest, Jace sure confused the heck outta me back in those years. He was straight as straight could ever be, no doubt about it. Girls loved him, and he loved them right back. But to my mind, he was always a little wonderfully touchy-feely whenever we were together.

 _Touchy-feely_ , that's the right word. See, he would often put his arm around my shoulders for no reason, and he always opted for a bro-hug instead of a simple hello whenever he stumbled across me in the hallways. More than once, half-way through telling some particularly hilarious joke, when a small crowd of followers had materialized in a semi-circle around him to gawk, he would unthinkingly clasp me in the shoulder, or else borrow my shoulder as his elbow-rest, all without missing a beat on his punch lines. He thought nothing of sitting directly facing me as we shared fries, and sometimes drinks too, in a crowded fast food joint. While playing games or watching television alone in our room, he would sidle up right next to me on the couch when there were plenty of space elsewhere.

The other guys, his athletes and jocks friends mostly, were sometimes brutal in their comments, teasing him like _what's up with you and that Alec boy, is he your bitch or something?,_ to which Jace would only laugh good-naturedly and dismiss them with a simple _jealous much, Noah?,_ sometimes adding a tight clasp around my shoulder for emphasis. I had since discovered that the best neutralizer against taunts like those is to be good-naturedly indifferent to them.

Of course, that Jace was so unquestionably straight had worked a great deal in his favor. He was like one of those soccer players who hug and kiss one another in the heat of the moment and get away with pretty much all of it.

It had always puzzled me no end though, why he was always being so wonderfully affectionate with me. He didn't behave in remotely the same way with other guys, as much as I could think of. With the ladies, Jace was a different bird altogether, of course.

I did gather up enough courage to ask him one night, if the taunts in the locker rooms had bothered him at all. He told me, and I remember this very well, he said to me very earnestly _not really no, I don't care what they think. I like it when you're around, Alec. Now this sounds silly, but I think I have separation anxiety issues with you ha. No seriously. It's like you're this safe haven, this secure base from which I can explore the world from. Does that make any sense?_

Many years later Izzy, who was doing some in-depth psych for her Pathology track, commented that it sounded very much like the bond that ties identical twins from birth. 

But he wasn't finished there. _I'm comfortable whenever you're around, that's all,_ he went on to say. _I like it when sitting next to you. I like talking to you. And I feel like I'm in dire dire need to say no-homo after all that, but fuck it. Be it what it may. So there, Alec,_  he grinned widely, _I've bared my heart to you, happy now?_

He was a few weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday at the time, I think.

 

 

***

 

 


	10. The Oracle At Dagobah

The Oracle at Dagobah looked no older than the youth who had sought his counsel.

"Come forth my child," beckoned the Ageless One, breaking the eerie silence all around them.

The youth hesitated, stopping a moment to take in his surroundings. There were no attendants to be seen anywhere. To all knowledge, Dagobah was bare of all life and construction, with the exception of it being the chosen residence of the all-seeing, all-knowing Oracle at Dagobah.

The young man stepped forth uncertainly, but stopped quite a bit further than was warranted for polite conversation.

The Oracle, who remained seated, studied him where he stood, his gaze sharp and expression inscrutable. Orange candle flames flickered, casting moving shadows and ominous shapes within the enormous cavern walls surrounding them.

"Your name," bid the Oracle in a clear, rather archaic intonation.

"Socrati Yodei", offered the young man, trembling a little.

"And your offerings," demanded the same clear, singsong speech.

The youth put forth a tidy black box in the shape of a pentagon before him, and immediately took a step back to his former postiion.

"Twenty years worth of memories, in the form of five penta-bytes of visual, auditory, emotional and temporal lobe imprints. It isn't much. It's all I have, my entire life," he said.

The oracle sounded almost kind when he replied. "And it is accepted, with gratitude, in accordance to the terms of supplication."

"May I begin?" asked Socrati, giddy now with anticipation.

"Ask me your questions," said the oracle.

"Then I ask for the meaning of life, as only you can answer," declared the youth.

The oracle thought for a quick moment. Then he answered, sweet as a lullaby. "The meaning of life is different for you, than the meaning of life is for me. The meaning of life is different for all. It is different for a pet dog who seeks to please its master above all. It is different for a loving mother who seeks to protect her baby daughter against all odds. It is yet again different for a hardened convict facing a life of imprisonment. There is no universal meaning of life." 

The young man frowned visibly. "Then what is the most important thing in life?" he insisted.

The oracle gave a tiny chuckle. "The most important thing in life is different for you, than it is for me. The most important thing in life is different for all. It is different for a young man, such as you, in the full bloom of youth and the intoxication of first love. It is different for a pious old man seeking eternal salvation nearing the end of his life. It is different for a gold fish swimming in circles in a tank. There is no most important thing in life that is universal."

Clearly dissatisfied, the young man pressed on, rather recklessly. "Is it true, that you are older than our oldest ancestors who roamed our world? Is it true, they say, that you have seen civilizations rise and fall? Is it true, that you are the oldest of all living things that still live?"

The oracle paused. He looked questioningly at his supplicant. It took moments before the youth realized that the silence was meant to be the answer. The Oracle answers, or he answers not, as he pleases.

The boy was deeply hurt. "Tell me, oh wise one, grant me this much, for I need to know."

The Old One smiled at him almost kindly, then said, "It is not for you to ask, nor it is for me to reveal, the answer to a question more colossal and more dangerous than you may realize."

Socrati was beside himself seething with emotion, "Twenty years of life experiences, twenty years of intimate memories. All I have ever felt, all I have seen, all I have experienced, all I have done. I have given my all to you. The least I can ask in return is this." His anger spent, the boy turned melancholic all of a sudden. "Please," he implored.

The oracle sat motionless, as if a statue had taken his place. A long sigh began to echo in the cavernous cavern that held the secretmost secrets. 

"One million, and three hundred forty thousand years, give or take a few thousand years," came the low-voiced, hushed reply.

The youth could not resist a cry of alarm. "How can that be?" he asked, full of incomprehensible wonder. "What is it like to live for so very long? So impossibly long?"

But the Ageless One was ready with the answer to even that. He calmly replied, "What is long to an ant is different than what is long to an elephant, which is again different than what is a long relative to the age of the universe." He paused, and seeing that the boy was still following, continued, "A fly who lives twenty-four hours could not possibly comprehend living for an entire year. A household cat who lives half a dozen years could not possibly comprehend living for a century. And one such as you who lives a hundred years could not possibly comprehend living for a million years. But the wheel of time never ceases turning. The universe goes on, and life elsewhere goes on, with or without you." He smiled kindly at the young man in front of him. "Socrati, do not fret over this. To each is given the gift of life, which is the ultimate gift of all. It is enough to make the best use of that, in the time that is given to each."

When Socrati looked up at him, it was then that the Old One discovered that the shock had vacated the boy completely, and the one who had seen it all was surprised again for once, to see a look of pity in its place. "What _do_ you remember, after all this time?" asked the boy. "Do you remember dearest mother and father who brought you into this world? Do you remember lovers who grace your immeasurably long life? Do you remember friends who share together the burdens of living? Do you?"

The oracle smiled again despite himself. The youth had impressed him after all. How could one so young begin to see through the eyes of one so inconceivably old, he wondered. And why had he come to this forsaken place of all places, and come here bearing and surrendering his entire memories, intimate feelings, painful secrets and rawest emotions, the most horrendous violation that one being could inflict upon another.

Gently, slowly as if in a dream, he shook his head. "I do not remember, not anymore," he concluded, more sadly than he had intended to let on. "It is _your_ life-long memories, and those life-long memories of countless others who had come here before you, it is their memories and their experiences that have fed and sustained me into this far distant age, my dear boy."

The youth nodded sagely, as if in possession of a wisdom impossibly beyond someone of his twenty years. "Do you remember your name _still_ , after everything?" he inquired.

There was a hint of something in his voice, something other than formal curiosity, that caught the Ageless One offguard. It was perhaps a hint of friendship, and the tiniest hint of personal concern, that surprised him most. 

"Yes," replied the oracle. " _That_ , my given name, I do remember to this day."

Socrati looked so rigid, his breath suddenly hitched, so tense he was he was holding his breath without thinking. "Tell me..." he implored.

The oracle sighed once more. "My given name, which none had uttered in a million years," said the Oracle, "was Magnus Bane". 

"Magnus..." repeated Socrati, as if in prayer or in deep trance.

"Alas my boy," sighed Magnus resignedly, "I am indeed Magnus Bane, and yet I am no longer Magnus Bane. Time has washed off that and countless other identities even more than I can remember. The I that I am now had replaced the I that I used to be a thousand years ago, which had in turn replaced the I that I used to be a thousand years before that, and so on."

"I am now, for no clearer identity, I am now simply called, The Oracle."

 

 

***

 

 


	11. Couples Therapy

Have I told you about Ms. Caroline yet? Our sociology instructor, no? Never mind, I'm going to put it all out there anyway. This one's one of my favorites to recount, how Jace went through his horrendous denial phase and how we ended up pouring our hearts out to poor Ms. Caroline, our kooky, but very affable, sociology instructor.

We had her for two consecutive years, our junior and senior years, at the NY'Stute. Ms. Caroline was, well, she was easily the most unhunterly Shadowhunter you could think of. She couldn't hold a knife without freaking out, and the closest she came to passing the Basic Armed Proficiency Exam was probably her chopping and dicing with a chef's knife. She did have a B.A. in psychology though, followed by an M.A. in anthropology, so we, wise and understanding seventeen-year-olds we all were, decided to grant her a _wide_ berth of leeway with regards to her dismal fighting abilities.

She used to spend years in Samoa, studying the indigenous cultures there, so again we forgave her too when she got carried away in class once, comparing teenage life in Samoa to that in New York City. Needless to say, after an hour of back and forth, the labored conclusion we all came to eventually was, nil comparison. She once tried to assign Margaret Mead's classic "Coming of Age in Samoa" for seniors required reading, before Maryse stormed into our class unceremoniously and demanded that she rescind her reading list, and _burn_ any copies of the god-forsaken book lying anywhere in the Institute building. Jace and I only loved her all the more after that singularly traumatic episode for her.

Anyways, about the time when we were both individually considering whether to take on the parabatai oath, Jace suddenly had a preposterous notion that he couldn't love me quite the same way as I love him at the time. I had no idea how much of it had he thought he'd figured out in his head or how long had it all been cooking inside him, but one night as we were both getting ready for bed, he suddenly blurted out, "Hey Alec do you know that marriage without physical attraction don't tend to last very long?" 

I was dumbfounded. I didn't even know such a thing was possible, how could anyone decide to marry without having at least some, hopefully _a lot_ , of physical attraction in the first place. Beyond that, I was wary of him somehow trying to extrapolate that tidbit of fun-fact into our situation. We were considering to be parabatai, not to be married, for God's sake. "Let's ask Oline that in class tomorrow, it'd be so much fun to see how she gets her panties in a bunch over that," I joked. Jace grinned back in agreement, and that was that, situation defused.

The idiot that I was, I honestly thought that that would be the end of it, until Jace actually did ask Ms. Caroline the same question the next afternoon, and not during class, but after the bell rang and the rest of the kids had all petered out. Come to think of it, Jace must have timed that apparent coincidence very shrewdly, for he had insisted on showing me some of his new rune drawings right after the bell rang, waiting long enough for the class to empty out, but not long enough for Ms. Caroline, who had taken her time to sort through a stack of newly handed-in assignments, to leave the classroom.

"Ms. Caroline, I was wondering if it's true that getting married without having any physical attraction tend to result in a short-lived union?" asked the smart alec.

I thought I could see her eyeballs pop out as her jaw drop to the floor as she eyed Jace suspiciously, looking left and right cynically for a hidden camera of some sort. "I will answer that if you will tell me honestly why are you suddenly asking me that," she replied, turning the tables on us in a single sentence, a chess move worthy indeed of a master psych B.A..

"Alec and I are considering to be paratabai," replied Jace very matter-of-factly.

Ms. Caroline drew a breath. " And what does that have to do with you asking me that?" she probed, still not fully convinced.

"Well," explained Jace, "Lately it keeps occurring to me that I might not quite be feeling the same way about Alec as he does for me". I blushed beet red hearing all this, but knowing Jace, I instinctively retreated and kept within myself. It was pointless as trying to stop a raging bull, to try to stop Jace at that point.

It was good that her countenance had then softened considerably. She looked at me, then back again at Jace. She seemed unsure of what to say at first, weighing a few options before opening her mouth. "These are pretty thin ice we're treading, as you probably know. You do, Jace? Alec?" We both nodded at her. "Try not to draw too much of a parallel to your unique situation. It's generally true that consenting to a marriage without the physical attraction is like stacking the odds against it. But people all over the world do marry for many reasons. Maybe a ticking biological clock is the impetus, or maybe pressure from parents or society was too great to resist. Maybe they simply couldn't say no for fear of hurting the other party. Maybe they thought that he would make a good father or that she would make for a caring mother. Many reasons have and will continue to be made for finance and social status. One usually has to temper idealism with some degree of realism in the end."

"So if I can't love him," Jace pointed sideways at me, but kept his eyes fixed solely on her, knowing how close I was to bolting out of the classroom, so intense was my embarrassment, "If I can't love him as he loves me, would it be stacking the odds against our parabatai union?"

Ms. Caroline ran a hand through her long, beautiful hair as she stayed silent, sifting through her thoughts. "Parabatais are often not romantic partners," she began. "There are many examples of such bonds, familial bonds between father and son, or between brothers and sisters, for example, that are completely chaste. Religious love is ideally chaste yet all-encompassing and self-sacrificing." 

Suddenly she thought of something, and immediately turned to Jace to ask, "Does that trouble you? That he is attracted to you?"

Jace shook his head. "No," he replied plainly. "If anything, I'm flattered. I wish so much that I could return the favor, you know. Sometimes I wish I could feel the same way he does, for him." 

Ms. Caroline tried to suppress a small chuckle on her part. "Oh, you'd be amazed how attraction is sometimes not something completely, entirely fixed in stone," she smiled knowingly. "The brain is a wondrous invention. With enough tinkering and stimulation, who is to say that it is not possible at all to make one feel somewhat attracted to a goldfish? But all jokes aside, seriously if you don't have a problem with it, Jace, I don't see any immediate problems facing you two, no?"

"All jokes aside, I'm afraid that I might only end up disappointing him in the long run," confessed Jace, heavy as the setting sun.

Ms. Caroline smiled kindly at us. "The Samoans do have a solution you know, for the perennial problem of physical attraction. They call it simply, just as we do over here I believe, they call it, open relationship. Look into it by all means and see how it might serve your situation. But well, I'm afraid boys that I have stepped far far above my station already." She dropped her voice to a playful half-whisper. "You both know what Maryse's reaction to yet another Samoan incident is probably going to be like."

We groaned in unison, mainly for her benefit.

Finished with us, Ms. Caroline raised herself from her chair, and gave us another of her kooky smiles. "I have an inkling, and I _am_ a pretty darn good observer of people even if I do say so myself, I just have an inkling that you two are going to turn out alright. Don't overly worry, kay?"

She was gone in a minute, leaving Jace and I alone in an empty, deserted classroom.

"Do you believe her?" asked Jace, when our eyes finally met.

I nodded, and he nodded back, rather shyly I thought, and my heart stopped beating for a sec there, for Jace wasn't known to be shy about anything at that ferocious age.

 

 

***

 

 


	12. Junior High Prom

Our junior high prom dance at the NY'Stute is forever etched in my mind being the first time Jace and I had a date together. The final months of middle school were upon us, and everybody was preparing for graduation. Most everybody in our class was splitting up. Some were migrating with their families to institutes in other countries, some heading for nearby institutes in neighboring states, others off to pursue other options. The junior high dance would be one final chance for all of us to get together and have some fun. 

Jace was having an epic middle school love affair with a French girl named Monroe, so we did all the usual preparations for such an occasion. We cooked up a generous plate of spaghetti with meatballs, and I held out different colored markers for Jace to write on a giant placard, "What's the _PASTA_ bility you'd go to prom with me?" We ambushed her during the busiest hour at the cafeteria, and there was a great round of applause, complete with catcalls and whistles, celebrating their kiss and the PDA that followed.

I helped Jace pick out his first tux and bowtie a good full month before the event, before he and I scoured half of Manhattan to find a matching corsage for the weird shade of Burgundy she would be wearing. We made proper dinner reservations at an upscale Italian restaurant in the Upper East Side. Jace got a straight razor shave and a neat haircut at a men's barbershop before the big day. What a fourteen year old would get out of a straight razor shave is still beyond me to this day. 

I hadn't planned on attending prom myself, for lack of a suitable girl, I told Jace. Well, that wasn't quite the whole truth. Emma in class, as well as Allison who was one year our senior, had been dropping rather obvious hints to my mates Billy and Sean all month long. Jace heard about it soon enough, and thought it was beyond _awesome_ that a high school girl would deign to take me out to a dance. He pestered and pestered, and I dillied and dallied saying I had too much schoolwork to do, I'm not into older girls, it's prolly too late to get tickets now, yada yada. 

Two weeks before the event, armed with only the vaguest progress on both fronts, we upped our rentals to two tuxes nevertheless, at Jace's insistence. I had been avoiding Emma for weeks now, waltzing into class at the last possible second, and zooming back out as soon as the bell rang. But amazingly enough, Allison had the gall to come over and chat me up during lunch one afternoon. Jace playing wingman was overacting by Oscar proportions, chirping how we'd make the best dancers at prom and how we'd be able to show everyone what a good time looks like. "Who are you going with," he asked Allison, and upon hearing her vague "Oh we'll see", without adue promposed her for me in the sweetest way possible. "Alec hasn't got a date yet. Why don't you take him to prom?"

And so I had my prom date after all, late to the ball like Cinderella. Suddenly it was Jace who was chaperoning me everywhere, scouring the other half of Manhattan for another matching corsage to the out-of-this-world Tosca shade of Allison's dress. Why couldn't they all just wear black like proper handsome boys do, I wondered. I had the same neat haircut at the same barbershop, minus the straight razor shave, while Jace lingered on by the waiting bench. Like Cinderella, we too rented a horse-drawn carriage from some stables in Alicante, to pick the four of us up from the steps of our dormitory and drop us by the entrance to the banquet hall, some fifty yards away. 

The day of the prom dance, the floors down below where all the the girls were living was bustling with ill-clad women wandering to and fro. Manicures, pedicures, makeovers, and return trips to the hairstylist, _nothing_ was over the top for this one day when every girl gets to become a princess. Sure, boys get to become princes for the day too, but we were generally too out of touch with our emotions to notice. I helped Jace put on his bowtie and his tux, and he held my wrist as he straightened out my shirt sleeves which was stubbornly sticking out of my overly tight tux sleeves. Then, a dash of Nautica cologne for Jace on his neck and lower jaw. He reached out and dabbed a generous amount on my neck and jaw as well. Not only were we dressed the same, we smelled the same too.

At five in the afternoon we picked up our dates in their respective rooms, corsages in hand. Jace pinned his corsage so lovingly on Monroe's dress while her parents watched on. Jace sounded so responsible, the hypocrite, making small talk about our plans for the evening, and what time they should expect their daughter to be back. When we got to Allison's, I got irrevocably tongue tied, so I quietly slipped on the wrist corsage I had gotten for her and off to the ball we went.

The dance was okay, but not anything great to me. I'm sure Jace had a far lovelier time at it. For the most part I went through the motion of resting a hand on Allison's waist as she put one on my shoulder, as we all swayed left and right together like a school of fish in the ocean. She tried to get a conversation going a number of times, but I was still too tongue tied to respond much. The wood was too drenched, no fire would start. She must have thought me a _singular_ moron to this day. I was perusing the staff assignment rosters a while back and found her name listed as quartermaster for the Stockholm Institute. Needless to say we never kept in touch after that fateful night.

Back again in our room that night, no sooner had the door closed behind us, Jace reached out and swung his arm over my shoulder. "Don't be so downcast, Alec," he said. "Didn't you enjoy any of that?" I shrugged and made some lame excuse. Suddenly he swung his other arm across and turned me halfway around, so that we were facing each other completely. He took down the floral boutonniere that was pinned on my tux lapel, courtesy of my prom date. He then took off his own boutonniere as well, and then so lovingly he pinned _his_ boutonniere on my tux exactly as he had done for his date earlier that evening. Next he pinned the one he had taken off me onto his own tux. 

"Better now?" he asked quietly. My eyes watered, and I got badly tongue tied again, so I only nodded softly back at him. Next time, next dance, things would be so much different, I vowed to myself. 

 

 

***

 

 


	13. Third Wheel

Needless to say, after my downright disastrous date with Allison, Jace took it upon himself to coach me in the ways of the world. _Don't knock it till you try it_ became his new maxim, and his half-ass half-willing best buddy his lifelong project and guinea pig. 

We talked about all the various girls in our class, all the time skirting around the one thing that can't be spoken. " _What about Martha? She's cute, and very fastidious too, like you. I'm sure you'll get along."_ I shook my head vigorously, recalling how a certain very fastidious teacher once chastised me in the hallway in front of everybody, appalled by the flab of my shirt sticking out from under my belt. " _Sophia, then? She's smart, and she's unmaterialistic. She's so your type."_  I don't like spectacles, I purred. " _Charlotte? Patient, generous, and oh so creative..."_ Actually, I'd like someone more adventurous, I told him. Jace grimaced, burying his face in his hands. Suddenly he blinked and grinned mischievously. " _Noah! Athletic and nicely muscled, will never cry, won't hug, an all round bad boy. So hot!"_  I punched at him, not playfully at all. He ducked underneath his pillow. " _Ahhhhh, don't Alec, I love you I swear...",_ was his way of begging forgiveness.

But Jace was nothing if not persistent. _"What about a girl whose hair is shorter than yours, and whose biceps are bigger than yours?",_  he wondered the following night after that. I closed my eyes and pretended not to hear. " _I kinda like that actually",_ he concluded for himself. " _What about a girl who's athletic, who's not afraid to show you who's boss?"_  I don't take well to bossy people, I informed him. " _What about a girl, who's secretly a boy on the inside?",_ wondered Jace. I punched him again, albeit a bit more playfully this time.

A week later Jace decided he would like to attempt a three-way relationship between the three of us, just like the one he had first heard on Reddit. Monroe, her luscious French ancestry notwithstanding, nearly choked on herself upon hearing that. Of course, middle school romances being mostly about hand-holding while watching the television side by side like BFFs do anyways, it wasn't actually _that_ improbable an arrangement to implement. As everybody in the institute had probably found out by then, I'd only end up getting tongue tied all over again if I sit next to Monroe, so Jace always ended up taking the center spot with Monroe on one side and me on the other. Over the summer holidays, we managed to binge watch, unwaveringly side by side, full-season reruns of Boy Meets World, Wolfblood, Supergirl, and even a little-known show called Tower Prep which sadly lasted all of one season. 

Three-way dates were a bit trickier for us, and I was never more hyperaware of how narrow sidewalks truly are, as I so painfully found out in those months the three of us had taken long walks all over NYC, side by side. Roller coasters were even worse, for their exclusively coupled seats. We ended up riding the Coney Island Cyclone three times in a row, at her insistence, just so each of us in every possible permutation can get to sit and scream together exactly once, and experience being the third wheel behind exactly once as well.

Her full name turned out to be Jeanne Monroe, and she was a very decent, very lovable girl it turned out. I could definitely see what Jace had first seen in her. She had a certain cheerfulness and eagerness about her, that lifted the spirits of people around her. She was like the sunshine that soothed Jace's endearingly boyish brassiness and my very own bumbling awkwardness.

It's funny how differently you look at someone once you get to spend enough time with them. I don't think I ever managed to appreciate her contours in quite the same way as Jace's pair of eyes could, but I was definitely happy to spend time with her. On her part, I guess Jeanne was basically smiling ear to ear within herself at having landed two prized birds for the price of one. Jace, of course, was perfectly happy with the situation, him having given birth to our current arrangement in the first place. So, happily ever after we would have lived then, if happily ever after does exist.

Alas, Jeanne's extended family decided to enroll her in the Marseille Institute in France after our graduation, and while we did _try_ our best to keep in touch for a year or so after our goodbyes, the coming all-new roller coaster of high school was soon enough upon us, and it would prove itself far too bewildering, far too engrossing for our bond, already stretched four thousand miles thin, to survive much beyond it.

Jeanne later got married, soon after her eighteenth birthday, to a fellow named Gaspard she had met while in high school in Marseille. We were invited, coincidentally within about a month after our own parabatai ceremony, and Jace and I did attend Jeanne's wedding ceremony, newly minted as parabatais in love, there for the big day as special guests of the bride and groom.

 

 

***

 

 


	14. Premonitions

The _toga virilis_ was the biggest ceremony that marked the endpoint of our high school career. It was a carried-over tradition from ancient Rome, when a young man would undergo ceremonial shaving of his beard, take off the _bulla_ amulet he has worn since childhood, enroll as a citizen in the census and begin his military service. It had over centuries morphed into a Clave initiation ritual of sorts, where young men and women upon completing high school would embark on a long, laborious quest for an item or achievement of some value to the Clave as a whole.

Many treated it no more seriously than the Senior year science project everyone dreaded about. Some went to great lengths to spin their last minute trek to a dilapidated demon lair two blocks away from the institute, where they hurriedly chopped off a spider queen's head or two, then wrote a ten-thousand-word thesis on how their epic quest achievement had _voilà_ ensured lasting world peace, long term prosperity and turned the world into a better place.

Jace, a boy in ample possession of "certain grand delusions and messianic complex" (according to a report card comment he once received), of course had a far better idea. You see, our Seraph blades, as then forged by the Iron Sisters, used to contain a fifteen-percentish level of impurities, due to interactions with ionizing particles from the cosmic background radiation at the moment of forging.

Jace's brilliant idea, which he had painstaking checked and rechecked with Dr. Feyn our physics instructor, was to retrieve all the required materials and reagents needed to forge the NY'Stute graduating class's lifetime use Seraph blades from the Iron Citadel, then travel to the deepest cave system known to man, the Krubera Caves in Abkhazia, and proceed with the forging ritual himself down there, thereby ensuring a much more perfect Seraph blades of nearly zero impurities. Eight _thousand_ miles thick rocks and soils above the cave system would serve to block out most of the radiation from cosmic rays, you see.

Well, unfortunately things didn't go so well for him after that. Mother lost her head completely and started yelling at Izzy, at me, and then at father, like a merry-go-round around the dinner table: _"Who's the genius that put such a stupid notion in his head?!"_ she thundered. We told her how Jace had come up with the idea all by himself, but apparently mother never quite gave Jace's brain enough credit, for it was overgrown by that most gorgeous mop of blond this side of heaven has ever seen. "Dr. Feyn checked his calculation and pretty much agreed with the projected enhancement," I came to his defense.

"Over my dead body!" mother spat at us, eyes afire. "I would not have my son go on a fool's errand, from which he'll likely never return!"

Dinner proceeded in utter silence after that, even the flowers in the table centerpiece looked more wilted than ever, having lost their enthusiasm from all the shouting that night. I could feel Jace's face burning with the flush of shame, his eyes red and brimming with unmanly tears threatening to slip out, which I knew he did his utmost to nurse. I pressed my knee onto his under the table, and felt him pressing back, accepting, if trembling a little.

I could feel something was off even after we got back inside our room. This boy so close to me was struggling, this boy I had known forever who had all but blossomed into a fine young man now, this man so close to me was struggling, but there was no outward signs of it. He quietly said goodnight and turned off the light, cutting off the nightly conversation that we invariably had before dozing off. I must have had a premonition something was about to happen, for I slept as light as a cat at first, woken by the slightest sound. Much later, overcome by fatigue, and still not sensing any movement on Jace's side of the room, I finally dozed off.

I dreamed I was in a darkened hut. A man, nay a strong warrior, was kneeling pious, deep in prayer at the center of the hut. "Send glory with him, all-seeing Zeus," he chanted, unseeing. "Strengthen the heart inside his chest, so the enemy sees if Patroclus can fight on alone, or if his hands are conquering only when I’m with him in the raging war. But when he’s pushed the battle back from the ships, let him return to me, here at my hollow ships, without a scratch, with all his weapons and companions, men who battle in the killing zone.” I was in the midst of _The Iliad_ , I realized, suddenly aware I was in a dream, but unsure of what to do about it. Then a thunder crackled heavily all of a sudden and the light seeping through the four walls of straw around us darkened. The warrior continued kneeling in perpetual prayer, eyes closed, as if a statue. A thunderous voice echoed all over me, "Counselor Zeus heard his prayer. He granted part of it, but part he denied. Father Zeus agreed that Patroclus should drive the enemy from their ships, but not that he’d return in safety from the war."

At that moment, I opened my eyes in horror. The next bed was empty. There was no one in the room. No time to put on any clothes, I raced down the darkened, deserted hallway. Knowing Jace, I raced up the stairway three at a time, heart pounding like a jackhammer. I reached the rooftop and released the door, barefeet and dressed in nothing but shorts, just in time to see Jace's neck and head hovering inches over the parapet. He froze, legs all poised and cocked upon the facade wall, hands a firm grip on a ten millimeter thick rappelling rope. I froze. We stared wordlessly at each other for what seemed like the longest time. "If you're going, I'm going," I told him in the end.

Jace froze again for some time. Then suddenly he grinned, cocking his head sideways. "You're hardly dressed for adventure."

I grinned back, loopily. "I know."

Another pause. Then suddenly, "Come!" he beckoned with his head, and a split second later he was gone.

This man will be the death of me. That much is true. Someday, he will be the death of me, I realized then, profoundly, with mixed feelings, as I rappelled down the nine-storey high facade of the church onto the streets below.

 

 

***To Be Continued***

 

 


	15. Priest's Grotto

"So, Krubera Caves, eh?" asked the handsome, teeny-bit camp Asian man in glittery outfit in front of us. He laughed seeing our hesitation. "Sure, sure, I can take you there, no problem. But what are you boys doing there?"

I looked about me, and I could feel Jace doing the same. There were said to be eyes and ears of the Clave planted in every corner of the Downworld. But the club seemed just a regular enough watering hole. Both mundanes and downworlders of all stripes had chosen to drop anchors here for the night. Everybody looked understandably subdued by this ungodly hour. I checked my phone. It was 4:05 am. We must have barely missed the regulatory last call, thank God. 

"Wait, wait, on second thoughts...," remarked the handsome man, now stroking his chin playfully, " _don't_ tell me, no! _Don't_ ask, _don't_ tell..." He winked at us. "Safer if I don't know, right?" I felt myself blushing for no obvious reason. 

"But pray do tell me," he said, holding a finger up in the air as in a Japanese anime, "what do you know about caves?"

I started to shake my head dumbly, when Jace, our resident cave expert, stepped on my foot a little too harshly. "We know all about the Krubera Caves being the deepest cave system in the world. It's known to be more than seven thousand feet deep, when last explored. And it could still go down much deeper than that, no one knows," he recited in perfection.

The warlock nodded, apparently satisfied. "Well, I can sneak you in near the entrance to Krubera, no problem, but I can't for the life of me get you a portal _into_ , or _out of_ , the cave. Not even in an emergency. Do you understand?" We both nodded at him.  

"What'd you do if you get lost, or trapped, inside?" he asked.

"Oh, I've got three light sources with me. See? Plus I've got a google map of the cave," answered Jace, evidently pleased with himself. 

The warlock nodded again, a bit uncertainly this time, methought. "The invincibility of youth," he muttered. "I miss that."

I scrutinized him much more carefully this time. His meticulously styled hair was jet black, and his facial features incredibly smooth and very attractive, I have to say. "And you get to say that because... you're twenty, twenty five?" I teased. (Or was it I flirted, in hindsight.) 

He chuckled and looked me deep in the eyes. "You're too handsome for sarcasm," he simply said. "Tell you what. At no extra charge, I'll wait five weeks for you to get your asses back here, or else I'll call in an anonymous 911 to the almighty. Sounds good?"

"We'd be all but dried and maggoty in five weeks, but thanks for your good intentions," quipped Jace.

"No, no, you certainly won't. Gandhi endured three _entire_ weeks of starvation, and still did pretty well for himself after that, I'd say. Water's abundant in these deep caves. Dripping waters off the ceilings or walls are generally safe to drink. And people doing prison hunger strikes had survived for as long as two months without food before death finally got to them. Little did they know, their horrible escapades were being carefully monitored by scientists all over the world, giddy as young brats on Christmas day, for here suddenly dropped on their laps was a free experiment that they'd never hope to pass the ethics board themselves."

And here I was gazing up dreamily at him all this time. "What's the longest time anyone's ever lived inside a cave, I wonder?" I asked dreamily, not sure which of it I'd found more captivating, the story or the storyteller.

The warlock visibly lighted up when he heard the question. A flick of his finger, and an ice-cold cocktail glass magically appeared in between my fingers. I looked over and caught Jace's matching o-shaped glare at the identical drink he was suddenly holding. "Virgin Margaritas for two not quite so saintly lads, I daresay," quipped the glittery man. "Do have a seat, make yourselves comfortable, but hang on tight boys, for here comes a story not for the faint-hearted."

"Let's see, where to begin? Uhm, how about this: after Hitler's rise to power in 1933 Germany, anti-semitism slowly but surely flourished there, reaching fever height in his country at first, and afterwards in neighboring countries too. Here was at long last a charismatic leader, who was astute enough to lure out some pretty deep-seated fear and hatred in his people, and made it the new normal. It was suddenly okay to be openly persecuting these Jews. No need to feel bad about it, right? After all, a popularly elected leader voted for by the people themselves had pronounced it an okay thing to do. Jews were driven from the their homes, forced out of their jobs and their schools, and later driven to concentration camps where many of them met with grisly, untold fate, sanctioned by the majority of their fellow citizens."

"In 1943, shortly after the breakout of the Second World War, a group of thirty eight Jewish runaways in Ukraine entered a giant maze of caves known locally as the Priest's Grotto, hiding from certain death that awaited them outside. The entrance to the cave was thankfully concealed, and it'd take a really difficult squeeze for anyone to pass through the opening successfully. Inside was a labyrinth of completely dark passages, leading from one to another without an end in sight. It was easy to get lost, even for the group of elderly men, women, as well as young children who hid themselves down there for a record 344 straight days underground. Luckily the elders among them had the foresight to stock up on various food items such as grain, cheese, potatoes, kerosene oil for lighting, and firewood for cooking, surreptitiously bought or stolen earlier from nearby villages. They slept a great deal, fifteen to twenty hours everyday, uncertain if the next day would be the day the police would finally raid the cave and get rid of everyone inside."

"Then one day, a group of ordinary villagers themselves came by and piled rubble after rubble upon the entrance, so as to bury them all alive inside. All hope was lost. They uttered their final prayers, said goodbyes to their loved ones, then laid down and prepared to die. But some never did quite give up even then. They tried and tried to dig another way out. By an amazing coincidence, after much desperate searching, the runaways were able to find a narrow, rocky opening close to the original entrance now blocked, very narrowly escaping their death sentence. But that was far from the end of their perils, for the police came for them not long after that, raining a hail of bullets down the small gap which became their new, smaller and even tighter entrance. Luckily, even the police dared not force their way inside the cave. Perhaps the only thing that saved the survivors' lives in the end, was the fact that the police and villagers believed that the Jews in the cave were armed and well secured behind a maze of secret tunnels and exits. In fact, the runaways had hardly any weapons inside, and there was no second exit from Priest's Grotto."

"After nearly a year spent in hiding, an anonymous message in a bottle was suddenly dropped into a crack by the entrance, in the middle of the night, telling the survivors inside about the defeat of the invaders and of the end of the Second World War, telling them it was finally safe to come out now. No one to this day would own up to being the secret anonymous sympathizer who helped out these despised cave-dwellers who hid for their lives not a hundred yards from their neighbors the same local villagers."

I sat across the man rapt in attention, not wanting to interrupt, even as his story was evidently coming to an end.

"Now this is a story that still resonates with many people, so many years after the fact, even when realities and times have changed so much, and what was once oppressed had incredibly managed to turn the tables oh so swiftly." The warlock stopped for a moment to take in a deep breath. "I think of the holocaust mainly as a cautionary tale. It was of course a monstrous tragedy that the Jews were sadly forced to bear the brunt of at the time. But the next time round, it could be anyone else. History repeats, no? Who'd be next, who knows? It was witches in the sixteenth century, then it was queers in the sixties, perhaps migrants in this second millennium A.D. Even if it's not ourselves this time, it could still easily be us next time round."

"How do you know so much about the holocaust?" I asked, still rather hypnotized by his singsong way of weaving a story.

The young warlock smiled to himself even as he held us in his gaze. He remained thus for some time, an enigma to the rest of us. "Do you still want to go caving after all I've told you?" he finally asked.

I looked at Jace, who nodded without any hesitation. I turned back towards him and nodded vigorously as well.

Satisfied, he stood up and led the both of us into a back room within the club. It was a private chamber full of magical artifacts of all shapes and sizes. He locked the door behind us, and proceeded with a lengthy incantation in some unfamiliar tongue. Suddenly, a green portal emerged in our midst, not unlike the bluish portal we were used to at the institute, but strangely greenish in color. "I can't hold it for long, you need to go now, if you're going at all," he told us.

Jace dropped a stack of hundred dollar bills by the table closest to us. "Five grand for the two of us, it's all I have saved up, is that okay?" he asked.

" _Economy_ class, is that all my portal's worth to you people? C'mon, not even _Business_?" the warlock laughed. We started to apologize, but then, "Go on, you two," he commanded. "Oh wait," he reached inside a side pocket of his tunic, passing something over to me. "Here's a VIP pass to Pandemonium, unlimited rides, free drinks. Come back here anytime, anytime you want to."

I glanced at him, confused but flattered all the same. "But, what about Jace?" I asked him. 

The young warlock flashed his gorgeous smile at Jace for a sec, and then back at me. "Oh he's alright, he can handle it, I'm sure." The three of us laughed, for whatever reason I wasn't quite sure of.

The warlock gave us one last great sigh then, as if dreading yet another goodbye. "Well, here's goodbye for now. May the Almighty's blessings be with the both of you," he smiled. "And hey, handsome boy, when, if, you do decide to come back here someday, ask for Magnus Bane. I'll be waiting," he said, as Jace and I took our plunge head first into the strange new world ahead.

 

 

***

 

 


	16. Night In The Cave

In more ways than one, a cave is like the inverted, negative image of a mountain. Mountain climbers go up and then down, cavers go down and then up. A mountain is a huge pile of rocks surrounded by the vast emptiness of air. A cave is a huge bubble of air surrounded by vast piles of solid rocks.

There _are_ however overriding differences between the two.

Mountaineers upon reaching the top of a snowy mountain know that their toil is finally over. Cavers upon reaching the bottom of a damp cave will _never_ know for sure if an undiscovered passageway is hiding around the corner, waiting to be explored for the first time ever.

Mountain climbers are continually rewarded with breathtaking panoramic views and clear exhilarating mountain air. Cavers, with pitch black darkness, endless same-looking piles of rock, freezing underground rivers and waist-deep mud.

No sane mountaineer would think to carry a hundred-pound scuba diving gear on a climbing expedition. No sane caver would _forget_ to drag a hundred-pound scuba gear into the world's deepest of caves.

Climbers injured many miles up en route to the peak can usually count on helicopter airlifts for rescue. Cavers injured many miles down the belly of the Earth can only sigh and take it for what it is: a death sentence, and a long and painful one, even for things as minor as a broken ankle.

Mountaineers learn to navigate through snow and hail and high-altitude air. Cavers, through impossibly tight squeezes, pitch black darkness and sporadic pockets of deadly, bad air.

So one chooses one's poison, one or the other. For Jace and I that summer we turned eighteen, it was a long, miserable descent to hell that was laying in store for us.

The entrance to Krubera wasn't anything like those glamorous and multicolored, well-platformed and well-manicured tourist caves that dotted most every holiday spot in every region, complete with bright yellow signs warning visitors of "Hazard Ahead: Deep Mud", or "Caution: Slippery When Wet".

Krubera, the world's deepest known cave system, had just about the most un-Hollywood-like entrance there was to any cave. It was located on a completely barren, otherwise forgettable piece of alpine meadow, where the tall alpine grasses suddenly gave way to a small gap of about a car width's wide. Nobody would have bet, unsuspectingly on the spot, that this wholly unspectacular rabbit hole would lead us down over _seven thousand_ feet into the deepest underground point anywhere in the world.

This small, insignificant-looking hole would in fact plunge down and down and down nonstop for a breathtaking two hundred feet, the full majestic height of a eighteen-storey tower. Jace and I rappelled down that easily enough, our heartiest compliments to Hodge and his very thorough instruction on martial arts and its many facets. In all honestly, say what you may of the big traitor Master Hodge turned out to be, the man no doubt knew his stuff, and Jace and I wouldn't be alive today but for his meticulous training back at the NY'Stute time and again.

But back to the cave, after that first initial deep plunge came a series of very tight passageways, followed by another breathtaking plunge of four hundred feet straight down, another solid forty-storey tower of empty space. Then came another series of impossibly tight gaps where we sometimes had to crawl and squeeze through a gap no wider than our shoulders and our chests. Then followed by another deep, mind-boggling plunge after that squeeze. And rinse and repeat, ad perpetuum. 

After a good ten hours of exertion, we decided to break for the night at the two-thousand feet depression point. We weren't even a third of the way to the bottom of Krubera. I had never felt more uncomfortable, muddy, sweaty, clammy, claustrophobic, as I did laying in the sleeping bag next to Jace that night. I'd had obviously no time to pack any of my own gear before rappelling off the institute facade after Jace in nothing but my shorts, given the extreme danger we were then facing of being found out. This meant all his personal supplies, clothes, food, water, sleeping bag, all the way down to his toothbrush, had to be shared by two.

I heard him groan next to me in the dark. I felt sorry for him. "Do you regret me coming now?" I quipped, squeezing about, sweaty and clammy within the impossibly tight fabric of a sleeping bag meant for one.

"Hmmm," answered Jace, half asleep, " I can handle it."

We tried various positions with our backs against one another, but it wouldn't do. It was simply too tight. In the end, I turned around and spooned myself against Jace's back. The immediate slack in the constriction was comforting enough that I slowly managed to lulled myself to sleep, so exhausted I was.

Jace adjusted himself a little to accommodate me. "Hmmm... Alec," he mumbled lazily, half-asleep. "I'm glad that you're here, with me", he drawled, though I couldn't be absolutely sure that was truly what he said, for my face was pressed tight against the back of his head, and the scent of his hair was too intoxicating to me to concentrate.

 

 

 

***

 

 

 Krubera Cave

 

 [Krubera Cave Expedition Team Photos 2012](http://kruberacave.info/index.php/en/expeditions/2014/122-krubera-voronya-cave-2014)

 

 


	17. Soulmates

I distinctly felt the early morning chill against my skin, even before I opened my eyes. It was pitch dark all around. I got all disoriented at first, and it took me a couple seconds to remember where we were. My frontside was all warm and snuggly, thanks to the fireplace that was Jace's body pressing on me.

"Are you up?" he asked, seemingly through the back of his head.

"Yeah, I'm up," I managed, for it was difficult to speak in our entwined position, my forehead resting on Jace's headful of blond hair, strands of which keep entering my mouth whenever I tried to speak.

Jace suddenly gasped and wiggled about, taking me along in his movements, for our bodies were practically sewed together from the neck down, stitched shut by the constricted space of our shared sleeping bag. "My neck," he giggled. "Damn, your breath tickles!"

"Well, just so you know, you hair don't taste near as good as it looks, either!" I spat, blowing on his hair purposely, just to rile him up.

"Stop chewing on my hair! Or else," he snapped at me, as we giggled some more like little boys. 

I don't think I could ever love Jace more, like this, just the two of us away from the big bustling world. There's something to be said about the warm touch of another person next to us whom we love. There's something about the heat of another snuggly, warm body pressing against ours that is so intoxicating, primal and so desirable about it. 

"Should we get going?" I asked reluctantly, shameful for having thought about Jace in those terms. It must be very awkward and creepy enough for him to be sharing his space with me so intimately like this.

"Erm... I don't know," he shrugged. "I'm thinking we can stay put and give ourselves a couple hours, start out a bit later. You?"

"Sure, I'll start whipping something up for breakfast," I told him, relieved.

For some reason, he started giggling all over again, wiggling like a worm. Our legs tangled further down, and I could feel the gentle coating of hair on his legs and thighs tickling my own.

"As long as it's not _that_ thing that's pressing on my ass all night long," he chuckled.

Too late I realized the state of my manhood. Fuck! I hated myself so fucking much for messing this up. I couldn't afford to mess up what we had, I'd never forgive myself again if I lose him. "Sorry. I'm sorry. Fuck, I so sorry, Jace! I didn't mean to, I swear!"

But Jace was soothing in his reply. "Hey, hey, so what?" he cried, which calmed me down from my panic. "We have the same parts, right? I know how it is. Everything's cool, Alec. Don't you move now, it's comfy like this."

"Aren't you freaked out?" I asked him, worried he might be covering his disgust for my sake.

It took him quite a while to answer that. But when he did, it was with a tone of voice that left no trace of doubt. "No, Alec, I'm not freaked out." As if to prove it, he laid his back now all flush against me, holding nothing back. "Besides, you're all warm and snuggly, and everything else here's cold," he joked coyly.

"I wonder if you're as straight as you think," I baited through a chuckle, as casually as I could, breathless and hoping against hope.

"Hmm, do you reckon?" he asked curiously, warm body pressed against mine.

"I would think you'd know what your dick prefers more than I."

"I don't think with my dick, Alec. And neither should you," he quipped. "That gorgeous warlock at the club, for example, definitely some major sparks going on down there, bud?"

"I don't wanna talk about it right now, Jace," I said. "Please?"

"Fine, all right. Let's talk something else. You know what this reminds me of, us stitched together like so? That old fable about how man was originally created round with two heads, four arms and four legs. Then, over time we got too arrogant for our own good, so Zeus as punishment decided to split man in half, each half of us ending up with only one head and two arms and two legs."

I smiled wistfully, knowing those very passages of Plato by heart, not through any special efforts but through constant rereading long before I was even a teenager. " _And so the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one,_ " I recited aloud.

Jace stayed silent for a time. "That's beautiful," he remarked afterwards. "I didn't realize you had it all down by heart."

I smiled at the back of his head. "I used to read them at night, with a flashlight under the covers, after mother put Izzy and I to bed and closed our bedroom doors."

"Before we met?"

I nodded. 

He sighed, wondering wistfully, "I almost can't remember a time when we weren't together."

"Me neither," I admitted.

"Do you remember any more of that?"

"The Symposium?"

"Yeah."

I took a deep breath, ransacking my mind for more bits I've held dear as a lifeline in my heart for so long. " _And when one of them meets his other half, these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell... Suppose Zeus were to come to the pair and ask, 'What do you people want of one another?', they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: 'Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life you will as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two -- I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?' -- there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need._ "

I could feel the ins and outs of Jace's breathing as he heaved a contented sigh. "Well, that's a good deal more eloquent than our Clave's own teachings," he said. 

"You know sometimes I...," I stuttered, "When I think of us... sometimes, you know, it reminds me of it." 

Major silence. That's it! My heart beat like thunder. I was convinced I'd stupidly managed to scare him off by that single slip of my tongue.

"It'd be so much simpler if one of us is a girl, don't you think?" asked Jace, a little sadly I think.

He and I grew quiet after that. I sighed and let out a small chuckle. "It would solve just about everything, wouldn't it?" I couldn't help but smile.

Jace chuckled too, good-heartedly. "Did wise old Plato leave us any bits of advice on man to man affairs?" he presently asked.

"Yes, he did." I told him. "He wrote about it quite rousingly in fact: _thus by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life... They who follow the male, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of men, because they have the most manly nature. They are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. When they reach manhood hey are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children, -- if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him... The pair is lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, even for a moment._ "

Jace shook his head in disbelief. "Jeez, he wrote that in, what, sometime B.C.?"

"385 B.C, if I remember right. Ancient Greek stuff."

"Dang, if they'd known all that then, what progress have we made in this last two thousand years?"

"To be fair, I think we've made quite a bit of progress, in science and tech," I replied.

We laughed, and suddenly I realized that my morning wood had very much subsided thanks to our dry, half-baked musings on philosophy.

"Hey Alec," he asked. "Yeah?" said I.

"Have you ever thought about becoming _paratabai_?"

"You and I?"

"Duh. You and I of course, dumbass!"

"Do you want to?"

"Do you?"

"Only if you want to."

"But what do _you_ want?"

"I don't want to impose."

"You're not imposing. It's only me. Tell me."

"I think I love you, Jace."

Silence. I could feel him thinking, through his body moving. "I'm quite sure I love you too, Alec."

"I think I love you more than you think you love me," I trembled.

He shook his head readily. "No I love you at max, already. If I love you any more, it'll just overflow."

"Like gasoline in your car?"

"Exactly."

"I'll kick your ass right now if I could."

"But you can't."

"Oh but I could. I have a third leg, don't forget... And it's positioned just about right."

"Urgggh, gross!!" groaned my best buddy in this whole wide world.

Despite it all, he didn't move an inch. Neither did I.

And it was at that moment that I realized, that mere words could never again come between us. I knew then that no matter what, where, and no matter when, even if the world should come crashing down and were we to lose everything else dear to us, no matter if we were separated or together, Jace and I would always still have each other. For once I realized, with great heaviness in my heart I later identified as great pride, I realized with a great painful thud that this wonderful being pressing against me on his own volition, this wonderful soul who had bared so much of its secrets to me alone and to which I had bared so much of my own vilest nightmares and dreams, this wonderful warrior brother who was closer than blood to me, who had unfailingly shielded and enhanced ten-fold what I was able to do in the battlefield, I realized then, with a heavy thud in my heart, that this man, my Jace, I could finally, honestly, literally say this of him: This man is mine. And I am his.

 

 

***

 

 


	18. Two Captains

It took us a good five more days before we finally reached the final chamber Dva Kapitana, or _Two Captains_ , located very deep down at a hefty -2,158 meters underground. It was quite simply the deepest underground point anywhere in the world. But, you see, the story of how it got to be so deep was anything but simple.

Like most tales of exploration, the Krubera Cave had a long and winding past. It was first discovered far back in the 1960s, when the initial -60 meter vertical drop stemming from the entrance was descended into by local cavers from Georgia. It was an interesting and significant discovery even then, to be sure, one which the cavers duly recorded in their comprehensive catalog of caves in the Arabika mountainous region. But nothing more was explored or expected of this little wholly unspectacular rabbit hole that was Krubera for the next twenty plus years. 

Finally, a group of Ukrainian cavers took a renewed interest in Krubera during the 1980s, exploring it over multiple expeditions to a total depth of -340 meters by 1987. Soon afterwards, however, political instabilities intervened; the Georgia region broke out into civil war during the early nineties, putting a hard stop on nearly all cave explorations in the area. It was only after the regional politics stabilized later that decade, that a new cave record depth of -740 was finally set in 1999. Since then, a flurry of activities had swept through Krubera, almost doubling its depth to -1,200 remarkably in a single year at the turn of the new millenium.

By 2001, Krubera was already crowned the deepest cave in the world, and like a newly discovered goldmine, cavers from all over the world now swarmed the cave, not unlike sports athletes at the Olympics, tumbling over one another trying to claim a new world depth record in their name. By 2003, its depth record had soared yet again to -1,710, set by a joint team of the Kiev Speleological Club and the CAVEX team. 

From 2004 onwards, Krubera's timeline began to read like a thriller novel. In July 2004, the CAVEX team decided to dive into a troublesome _siphon_ \- a submerged underwater portion of a cave tunnel - called the "Blue Lake", successfully reaching a further un-submerged continuation of the cave beyond it, and managed to set a new depth record at -1,840. Just one month later in August 2004, the Kiev Speleological Club discovered an alternate route within the cave, named it "The Way to the Dream" and, as fate would have it, ended up getting stuck at the _exact_ same -1,840 level as the rival CAVEX team taking the alternative "Blue Lake" route. Duh. 

Not two months later, in October 2004, racing against time, the Kiev Speleological Club mounted yet another headfirst expedition into Krubera, discovering yet another unexplored section of tunnel which led them miraculously down to a dead-end chamber at - 2,080 which they promptly named the "Game Over" chamber. It was the first time _ever_ a cave had been explored by man to a depth of over 2,000 meters.

There were no less than four competing expeditions into Krubera in the year 2005 alone, led by the same usual suspects, the CAVEX and Kiev Speleological Club, in February, July, August and October of the same year. Already, each expedition took as long as a month or more to complete, and required anywhere between a dozen up to four dozen enthusiastic cavers forking their own time and money for gear and supplies, plus taking on a grave risk to their general health and survival. 

The chamber of Dva Kapitana was discovered in this golden year of Krubera exploration, and at a depth of - 2,140 it still stands today, more than a decade later, as the deepest underground point in the world. The cave tunnel still continued in fact far far beyond the Dva Kapitana, no doubt about it. But it was all submerged underwater from that point on, and as hard as man tried, and try he did with all his might as the record showed, in the end man could not turn himself into a fish. 

The waters at Dva Kapitana was first dived to a depth of 17 meters in 2006 by a veteran diver named Gennadiy Samokhin, of the Kiev Speleological Club. The following year, in 2007, the same diver Samokhin extended the depth of his underwater tunnel exploration to a further depth of 46 meters. He considered it then to be the dead-end of Krubera explorations, given the hard limit of 30 minutes of scuba diving air that could be carried by a diver, not even accounting for the extremely difficult squeeze and twists of an underground tunnel, treacherous enough in a normal cave situation, now having to be negotiated completely underwater, with bulky oxygen tanks to boot. 

There had been new expeditions to Krubera every year since 2007, and multiple attempts were made to bypass the insurmountable difficulties at its very bottom, but no further success was achieved until another five years later, in 2012, when the very same diver Samokhin again risked his life and, despite much thoughts and planning, only managed to extend his depth record by a couple meters, to 50.5 meters. Thus stands the world record of Krubera Cave today, at -2,197 inclusive of the 50 meters of underwater tunnel section which was dived single-handedly by Gennadiy Samokhin.

Sadly, no further attempts at breaking the world depth record were made after the final 2012 attempt by Samokhin, as the predominant thinking among cavers was that this hard limit of oxygen supply was indeed an insurmountable barrier to any further exploration of the underwater parts of Krubera, and that this was a fundamental limit that would hold for a long long time yet, until such time when a transformative technological innovation in the future would transform the realities of man in scuba diving gear.

This is the point where Jace and I came in, for Jace, the popularly known blond and dumb jock athlete, one day had a singularly brilliant idea. You see, us Shadowhunters have long had a little-used rune we call _Meditation_ , mostly of interest to monks and Silent Brothers to assist in their daily ritual of Contemplation. It functions by greatly reducing one's metabolic rate, placing us in that grey area between death and wakefulness. As to how on Earth it might apply to our situation in the Dva Kapitana, unfortunately I'm so out of time, and out of breath, for now. I would drop a quick hint, though, that it had something very specifically to do with unborn babies in mothers' wombs. Till the next time, and happy wild-goose chasing!

 

 

***

 

 

James Cameron's "The Sanctum" (2011)

An underwater cave diving team experiences a life-threatening crisis during an expedition to the unexplored and least accessible cave system in the world.

 

 

 


	19. Life As A Fish

Diving is dangerous business, and nearly all the multitude of problems man has encountered with underwater survival has arisen out of their inability to breathe normal air in water.

Fish, having gills instead lungs, have no problems with spending their entire lives underwater. Their gills extract life-giving oxygen from the surrounding water with each breath, and expel carbon-dioxide waste products from their bodies on its way out. Lungs in humans and other mammals function in very much the same way, in fact, but at a far bigger scale than gills. If gills are the cute, little kitchen-use purple oxygen mills, then lungs are huge metallic industrial factory versions of them. Mammals need much much more oxygen than fishes do, due to our more complex brains and bodily functions.

It is not a given, however, that humans must breathe their oxygen from surrounding air. Babies in mothers wombs don't have to breathe at all, since all oxygen they need and all carbon-dioxide they excrete are passed on via umbilical cords attached to them in the wombs. In essence, their mothers are breathing for the both of them. Babies don't even breathe immediately after birth, for as long as their umbilical cords are not severed. This is what makes water birth viable; for there is absolutely no chance of poor babies drowning in water during labor, as they are not at all breathing during birth. Once umbilical cords are severed, an irreversible process begin to take hold whereby their inert lungs expanded for the first time, and the first breath is then taken. From then on, there is no turning back, and the newborns become air breathing creatures for life.

Humans have long concocted various contraptions in order to be able to breathe underwater. Modern scuba gear is but the latest iteration of such devices from long ago. Divers now carry oxygen tanks supplying them with breathable air that must accompany them throughout their dives. Even so, this technique of underwater breathing is still very hazardous and cumbersome. For one, breathing gas under the far greater pressures underwater puts divers at risk of the dreaded _bends,_ or decompression sickness, which results from nitrogen compounds in the breathing gas seeping into flesh and blood due to the immense pressure of the surrounding water. This puts a hard limit of about 300 meters of water depth that can ever be dived by a human; a paltry distance considering how a runner can easily cover that same distance in under one minute. A similar straight-down dive to 300 meters will take no more than ten minutes, but it would take more than 12 hours for the same diver to safely return back to the surface afterwards, having to make several hours-long decompression stops along the way to ensure his survival.

Perhaps 99 percent of all diving accidents are related one way or another to running out of air while underwater or ascending too fast. The other one percent covers freak accidents like being attacked by sharks while diving, and so forth. Many have noticed that just about all of these hazards can be totally eliminated if humans were somehow able to breathe in liquid. And guess what? Humans _can_ survive by breathing liquid. It is not water inhalation that kills a drowning person, but rather the resulting lack of oxygen that ensues. Human lungs _can_ absorb oxygen from water just as effectively as they do from air, it is just that the amount of oxygen in water is by far insufficient to sustain a living human being. Other liquids have in fact been tried in research and military settings, and animals and people have been successfully submerged alive in perfluorocarbon containing up to 40 times the amount of oxygen in normal water.

This is where our _Mediation_ rune came to our rescue. It functions by reducing a Shadowhunter's metabolism drastically, a bit like entering the low-powered state of a dying phone, thus requiring far lesser oxygen and creating far lesser carbon-dioxide waste in the process of breathing. Long story short, Jace and I were able to breathe in regular water indefinitely without any breathing apparatus, while within the spell of our _Meditation_ runes. We were fully conscious during the process, although fast movements were difficult and reflexes were slowed when under the effect of the rune. 

So, having checked that everything was in order, we continued past the unexplored underwater sections of the cave beyond Dva Kapitana for days on end. Breathing water like fishes, depth limits and decompression sickness were non-issues for us, and of course there was never a question of running out of water to breathe, either. For days on end, we swim like fishes exploring every nook and cranny of the tunnel before us, looking for further and further ways down. We ate solid food from our packs underwater like fishes do, drink the surrounding water anytime we needed to, and slept like fishes in mid-water next to each other. Caves are easier to navigate underwater in a way, for there is no risk of falling and no need for any rappelling or climbing. All we needed to do was to adjust our buoyancy devices attached to our belt, and up or down we go without much effort either way. Fishes are truly blessed and happy creatures in this way.

On the seventh day of our marathon dive, we finally reached a great narrowing of the tunnel such that no further progress seemed possible. Jace turned to me questioningly, fine blond hair spiralling all about his excited face like a halo reflecting my headlight. I nodded back at him in agreement, and he proceeded to take out the various steel and enchantments he had prepared all along. A single Seraph blade, made perfectly in the deepest of the deep, was all we needed. A prototype, and a proof of concept. Any number of blades can be forged again in the same manner in the future, once that elusive first had been successfully achieved.

So I began to utter all the requisite incantations, there were five rounds of enhancements in total, while Jace hugged the amalgam of various steels and reagents to try to keep them together in close proximity underwater. A white flash of extremely bright light blinded us for a moment, and when l looked down into Jace's hands, a Seraph blade complete with the familiar markings of the Iron Citadel was gleaming all silver and gold in his grasp. I looked up, hoping to catch his eyes and share our moment of triumph. It was then I realized the utter horror that was reflected on Jace's face. I looked down again and realized, to my horror of horrors, that Jace's hands and fingers that were grasping the newly forged Seraph blade were glowing in silver and gold all over too. A sound very much like the dial-tone of an old land line began to engulf me, and it took me a while before I realized, that it was Jace's panicked screaming at the top of his lungs that had produced such a sound underwater. Without thinking, I kicked on the blade, hoping to separate Jace from its grip, but it wouldn't budge from him at all, for the blade had somehow melted, or rather merged into Jace's pained grasp.

 

 

***

 

 

Thai Cave Rescue (July 2018)

 


	20. Maryse

Maryse Lightwood was a big girl, and she certainly didn't need this patriarchal assumption that anything might upset her and made her bring a lawsuit.

Being excommunicated was the single hardest thing she had been called upon to do in her life. It was as if the very floor had suddenly given way under her feet. In one fell swoop of a magistrate's hammer, she'd lost everything she worked so hard for all her life. Fresh out into the mundane world, she'd wallowed and drowned in her own private misery, too proud to contact anyone she used to know for dread of seeing their expressions on hearing her spectacular fall from grace. When she finally reached rock bottom nearly a month into her sentence, she'd spent her last nickel and dime getting herself a litre bottle of vodka along with a jumbo pack of Red Bulls, camping herself for one last time in a dark corner of a deserted bar after hours. 

By some grace or good fortune, she'd somehow lost track of time and purpose that night, and by the time the early morning sun had awaken her from her uneasy slumber, the mundane world had suddenly seemed a more livable place than ever before. So she set her mind afresh, and got to work right away. If there was anything she was no doubt a world-leading authority in, it was security and surveillance. And so, armed with nothing more than a stack of cheaply printed name cards and a couple leftover dress pants and jackets from her bygone days as Head of an Institute, she began cold calling anything from mid-sized to multinational companies in the Manhattan and Brooklyn areas, offering her expertise and services to any and all who would listen. That was before she realized how gleefully receptionists would laugh their heads off right to her face, amazed by her gall and audacity, and how doormen seemed content to let anyone through but her. More than once she was tailed by armed security escorts on her way out. For five or six months, she ate nothing but ramen noodles and bottles full of tap water filled up in public restrooms. 

One day, the manager at a local mid-sized warehousing firm took pity on the disheveled woman who still managed to talk oh so eloquently in front of him, and hired her to revamp the company's security rotation and surveillance system. Her contract lasted all of a month and a half. Then she was back to living from hand to mouth, banking on nothing more than her lifelong expertise in keeping law and order to keep her alive. There was a grave penalty for _anyone_ , up to and including immediate family, caught providing however small an assistance in any forms - money, food or clothing - to the excommunicated. She had no one to rely on but herself. But Maryse was a big girl. She would survive, she told herself over and over.

Using what little left she'd managed to save from her first job, she rented a dusty, windowless office off a pedestrian alley to the far south of Manhattan, paying rent by the week, and hired an equally poor and hungry programmer to condense and implement her lifelong knowledge-base into one giant proprietary algorithm for tech surveillance. She knew she could do this one thing better than most mundanes could, given her hands-on experience with the Clave's superior technology.

She booked a few contracts here and there in between, and in the process managed to upgrade their headquarters to a somewhat more presentable space in a rather more respectable street somewhat closer to mid-Manhattan. She hired a few more programmers, and even bought herself a full gym membership to relax and cool off in the evenings. Things were looking up, as more and more prospective clients took notice of her.

Then the New York Times published its famous piece on October 5th, 2017. The whole nation was shocked. Scandals upon scandals shook the country. None was immune. It seemed the higher up one got, the more precarious and vulnerable one became. Dirt from thirty or forty years in the distant past could be dug up in an instant. 

There was no doubt in her mind of the great benefit that the movement had bestowed on long suffering men and women in many industries in many parts of the country. 

Alas, it turned out that she wouldn't be one of the beneficiaries of this new empowerment. Here she was, an up-and-coming entrepreneur in the cliched and overcrowded tech sector desperately needing more funding for more codes and more programmers, but the venture capital industry had now closed itself off to most of women under the age of 50. These were already some pretty busy people, often with big responsibilities, and big salaries, in their respective companies. Often before, through no lack of charm and persistence on her part, she'd managed to coax and cajole a select few to hear her pitch over dinner or drinks outside office hours, or in the weekends. Those turned out to be some pretty indispensable networking opportunities for her, whereby some of the big wigs who had caught a good impression of her proceeded to tell their own friends of the new _CIA Lady_ in town, as she was popularly known after a while. Maryse was a big girl, and she could more than take care of herself, thank you for your concerns.

Now in this brave new world, sales pitches over one-on-one dinners or a few sips of drinks and friendly chats after hours were all completely out of the question. No one would risk it anymore. She had to go through proper channels, telephone operators and corporate secretaries, setting up meetings that were three weeks or one month into the future, then call back a few days before the date to reconfirm, only then to be told that the boss had just flown out of town earlier that week, sorry but the next available schedule would have to be, guess what, three weeks after today. 

Most everyone had stopped taking one-on-one meetings with anyone, with some even insisting on a colleague or secretary to be present in the same room. Jokes and friendly banters were nostalgic things of the past. Everything was more formal and straight to the point in this new world order, recorded and transcribed for future reference. More often than not, she was ushered in rather hurriedly and allocated barely 10 or 15 minutes to finish her entire pitch, while another appointee waited impatiently just outside the door, which would stay open throughout, of course.

It was then that she realized just what amazing things she could achieve given an hour or two with a client over a hearty meal and amidst casual chats about family and hobbies. Sometimes she wanted nothing more than to scream at her regular clients who suddenly would no longer look her in the eyes. She was a big girl, and she could more than take care of herself, thank you very much. She certainly didn't need this patriarchal assumption that anything might upset her and made her bring a lawsuit.

At times, it reminded her of that familiar old Nephilim motto she had always gone by in the past:  _Escensus facilis Averno est._ Most everyone had interpreted it in the most direct way possible to mean: _The descent into Hell is easy._ She knew however of another way of translating it into modern tongue, which she found herself obsessing more and more, as her newly risen business came closer and closer to crashing back down on her: _The road to Hell is paved with good intentions_.

 

  

***

 

 

"NBC News asked men and women in different professions across the US

how the movement had changed the way they interact with people at work. 

This is a sampling of those responses:"

<https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/changed-by-me-too>

 

 


	21. Doomed

Jace once told me, one late night amidst our nightly ritual of soft, droning conversations blanketed by total darkness, that he didn't fear demise per se. _Why,_ I'd asked back as quick as I could, my entire thoughts bent on how his family had perished in that tragic fire not two years ago. There were fates worse than dissolution, he said. How so, I insisted, mostly to keep him talking, so worried was I where this might be leading.

It was then I think that he first told me of his great aunt, who spent the last years of her poor soul in and out of intensive care. His father had brought him there often enough during her final months and made sure to have the boy watch on as doctors and nurses confined her to bed with tubes all over, giving her much needed medications to survive, and still others to drain fluids out of her body. Due to terminal stage HCV, her body constantly retained fluids that had to be pumped out of her belly every week.

For some reason, this was the only thought that kept flashing through my mind as I helplessly watched Jace screaming in hysteria, his hands glowing eerily in bright silver and gold flashes of light that one hardly associates with living beings. And then suddenly, the spell was over as abruptly as it began. Jace's body hung lifeless in mid-water. His newly forged Seraph blade that was the very objective of our quest was floating inches away from his shadow of a grasp. I shook him over and over, wrapping my hands on both his shoulders at once. He was unconscious, and I couldn't tell if he was still breathing or not. I held his arms that was glowing so very brightly mere seconds ago in my own bare hands, and examined them as closely as I could. Strangely, there appeared to be no burn marks or otherwise on them.

Relieved for the moment, I turned myself about in mid-water and slung both his lifeless arms over my shoulders. Grabbing each of his wrists tightly in my own hands, I swam hurriedly back to a spot I remembered we'd passed not five minutes earlier, where I had noticed some ripples on the ceiling reflecting our headlights, indicating a water surface and probably a dry air pocket above it. I swam up towards the surface above us with Jace in tow on my back, and thankfully found ourselves in a mid-sized underground chamber perhaps the size of a tennis court. Some rocks half the area of the chamber had protruded nearly horizontally above the water surface, creating a sort of a bizarre underground beach next to the endless dark waterways underneath it. As far as I could tell it was a dead-end chamber, meaning the only way out would be to dive back down from whence we came from.

I laid Jace down as gently as I could upon the rocky, uneven ground. We were both drenched from head to toe and dripping heavily with water, but I took both our dry blankets from our packs, which were waterproof, and wrapped him tightly within them after first getting rid of his wet clothing. His hair was matted and soaked with water that kept dripping into the dry blankets I had kept him in, so I rummaged our packs for a towel. Finding none but a T-shirt, I used it instead to dry Jace's head of hair as I checked for injuries elsewhere on his body. He seemed bodily fine. I could find no trace of a wound or any bleeding anywhere. He was breathing faintly, but he wasn't at all conscious. Despite my yelling and repeated shaking of his face and his shoulders, he wouldn't come to. 

I shivered, both from the intense cold and from the sudden realization of what had truly befallen us. I knew that something had gone terribly wrong with our unsanctioned, reckless, ill-conceived mission. I remembered the premonition that had accompanied our setting out for this ill-fated journey. So it finally came to pass, after all, Jace's fate and Achilles' heel. And yet, despite all that, the only thing I could think of at the time was, how we were both doomed men in here anyways. This was the end, and in the here and now there was no longer a question of if, only when. Strangely, that very thought somehow calmed and set me free as soon as it filtered through the core of my being.

I took a long and deep breath, then looked at Jace lying there so peacefully before me, and it dawned on me how, once you accept and embrace that your number is finally up, there is no better high in the world. There is only a kind of complete and utter freedom from all that nonsense in our world. Nothing could be so hard yet so easy. There is only one task left, for me. To protect him for as long and as best as I'm able. Let it not be said that I had at the very end deserted him whom I loved the most, or that I had failed and abandoned him in his last hour of need.

What was it again that wise old Plato once said of an army of lovers anyways? I think he said thus, “And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their beloved, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonor, and emulating one another in honor; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?”

I laid myself down and rest my head next to Jace's, bidding our time for when the end would come.

 

 

 

***

 

 


	22. Here, At The End Of All Things

I had never felt so alone, and I'd never felt so utterly lost and desperate, as I did that first night in the dark, underground beach, with Jace lying all unmoving, unconsious next to me. I washed his lifeless face over and over with t-shirts dipped in cold water next to our bed of hard rocks. I laid my ears on his chest and listened every now and again to his slow, labored breathing, and held his mouth open as I squeezed drops of water in every now and then.

I thought he would never again regain consciousness after what horrible thing had befallen him. But then, sometime in the perpetual night that was to be our resting place, as I closed my eyes and and thought of mother and father, of Izzy and the institute, of our room and our warm beds, and our television and the xbox adjoining it, I felt a warm tentative hand finding my forearm in the dark, touching and gently caressing.  

"You ow right?" he asked, of all things.

It pulled me out abruptly of my trance, and I turned round to hug him in one single swift motion, cupping his face in both hands and stradding him in the process. I could feel the stubbles on his jaw tickling my palm, even as he smiled weakly and quipped, " Hey, hey, it's just me, Alec." He grazed my sprawling hand with the sides of his mouth and, finding large movements too painful, placed a gentle kiss instead unto the side of my hand wherever his mouth could reach. "It's good to see you too," he whispered.

"Damn, thought I'd lost you for good," I sobbed, tears streaming my cheeks and raining down his. "Jace," I confessed, "I'm so, so afraid..." He nodded silently, managing with some effort to lift up a hand which he rested along the back of my neck. "Me too," he groaned, clearly in a good amount of pain. 

"Does it hurt?" I asked, as soft and soothingly as I could. He nodded a little, then close his eyes and nodded again, vigorously. I planted a long, desperate kiss on his sweating forehead, and tried so hard to hide the gargantuan pain that was suddenly engulfing my chest. "I'm here for you," I told him. "I'll always be," I wept, stroking his ears as lovingly as I could and sifting his damp locks of blond through my fingers.

"Go," he told me, almost choking. "Don't stay, not here, Alec. Go back to the institute. Go back. Take care of mother, take care of father. Don't forget to always care for dear Izzy for me. Ow right?" he sounded so very urgent about it.

I shook my head slowly, turned my shoulders and laid myself back down next to him, but keeping our temples lightly touching. I Iifted an arm up in the air and showed him the red and purple patches encircling many areas of the skin. Upon earlier inspection, I'd found similar patches of red and purple all over my body, though it wasn't spreading as viciously as the ones on Jace's body. "High dose radiation, lethal exposure" I managed to tell him, suddenly unable to catch his eyes. "We're both goners, you and me the same."

On hearing that, Jace suddenly let out a long, pained and harsh cry. He sounded angry and vexed somehow. But when he spoke at last, his voice was soft instead as a breath. "I've killed you," he sighed, exasperated. " _God_ , in all my selfishness and stupidity, I've done it at last. I've dragged you to your undeserved death, in this deep hell hole with no one to bury us." He banged his head onto the hard ground over and over, "I'm so absolutely sorry, Alec," said him.

I pressed my cheek onto his, caressing and rubbing our cheeks together, and told him to stop moving. Then I told him all about the premonition that had visited me the night he sneaked out on this foredoomed quest. He listened intently, and stayed silent for some time after that.

"Why had you come, Alec, if you'd known it'd come to this?" he asked presently.

I had to smile, despite our cheeks pressing together making it hard to do so, for it was a question I'd often enough asked myself may times along our journey. "I would have tried to stop you from going in the first place, but-"

Jace sighed and chuckled sadly. "-but I wouldn't have listened," he concluded in agreement.

"Pretty much," I admitted.

Jace grunted in pain. "You really ought to have stayed back, even then" he stated, matter-of-factly.

I shrugged quietly, my voice caught in my throat. "I thought I could shift the hand of fate," I told him in the end, holding nothing back. "I thought my coming along would change how things unfold."

We were both quiet for a long time then, thinking of the multitude of could-have-been and should-have-been that had peppered our lives up to this point.

"Do you love me so, Alec?" he asked, wondrously touched.

"I love you with all my heart," I confided frankly to him. There was nothing else to lose, no face to save here at the end.

"I'm sorry, so sorry, for treating you like shit sometimes..." I could feel him starting to drone. "All the nights I knew you waited all night for me and only pretended to sleep when I came in. I could have gone back sooner, I knew you were waiting. But I was enjoying myself too much with them. I'd take all that back if I could, I would, Alec."

Had he known that all these while, I wondered. All those sleepless nights I made myself endure in silence whenever he had gone out with his troupe of girls from our institute, most every weekend. "I still wouldn't have changed a thing," I sighingly told him, very heavily. "It's all of that, every bits and every pieces, that makes us really truly us. Take any part away, and we may not be what we are today." I wanted to tear up so bad.

Softly I felt him nudge, "Alec?". "Hmm?" I answered. 

"I don't think I've ever loved anyone more in my life," he said, with a finality that was rare for Jace.

He fell silent as he thought again for a minute, as if remembering something. Then he took a long deep breath, turned his shoulders to face me placing his hand on my emotionally heaving chest, and said very slowly, solemnly with emphasis, "I'm only glad to be here with you, Alec Lightwood, here at the end of all things." He paused, choking back tears, "Wouldn't have it any other way."

I felt another imminent drop of tear welling up inside me too, though perhaps it was only a tear of pure joy and happiness, if such a thing was indeed possible.

 

 

***

 

  


	23. Writing Is Healing

Having not much else to do, we spent our final pitch black days and perpetual nights writing stories and munching through our food supplies which, rationed conservatively, should last us for the a week or perhaps two, if the fast spreading radiation damages to our bodies had not overtaken us first by then. I found it amusing, how I had always thought I had no fear of dying, and yet when the time arrived, I found myself willing to do most anything for the sake of a couple more days breathing in this mortal world. 

Jace and I each wrote many many things in those final few days, some recollections of our past lives, others dreams of futures yet to be. We wrote like madmen, rushing to cram all of a lifetime of thoughts and recollections into a scarce few pages of paper. Never having kept diaries in the past, it was during those last days that I had first gotten into writing down little memoirs of my younger life. I wrote about how Jace and I first met, how I'd first accepted his outstretched hand in that ungodly hour of the morning in nothing but my pajamas, how it seemed like he had never again let me completely out of his grasp from that moment on. I wrote about my great consternation, laughable as it was in hindsight, of having to share a bedroom with another boy.

I wrote about my roller coaster summer of hell, when he recruited me to be his partner in the diving championship. I shed a tear or two reminiscing our incomparably humble coach, and wondered what had become of grandpa Greg, and who would have thought that we were the ones who would precede him out of this mortal world. I laughed helplessly as I jotted down all the elaborate preparations we both had to go through for the sake of our first prom dance. I thought about Jeanne, then I thought about Emma, I remembered Billy and Sean who used to be my best friends in childhood before Jace came along, and I remembered with a strange hyper-clarity that one night Mother and I had an epic fight about Call of Duty. Most of all I missed Boxer, who was my ill-fated pet dog from many years past.

Jace wrote a great deal himself too. We laid side by side writing on pads full of waterproof dive notebooks to pass time, only getting up once in while to relieve ourselves in the waters, or to rummage our packs for the daily rations we'd carefully segregated and marked for each passing day. Late on our second day lying there side by side, Jace pointed at the pages full of writings that I'd set aside beside me. He asked aloud if he could read it. I looked at him seriously. _A lot of it is about you, about us_ , I felt I had to warn him. He nodded and without a word took them onto his lap and began to read. _Can I read yours too?_  I asked with some trepidation. He glanced back at me, and our eyes held for some moments. He nodded, and then gathered those scattered pieces of papers lying about him, tidied and ordered them for a bit, before passing them all to me.

I took one look at the first page. It was titled simply: _Why I love my brother._

 

 

 

> Alec is like the brother I never had. God knows I love him more than anything else in this world. I don't think I'll survive ever losing him. We don't openly talk about it too often, but I think we understand each other perfectly on this. He knows, I think, that when push comes to shove, I'll always have his back and he can always count on me, no matter what. It isn't easy to explain why we love someone, but Alec is easily the most devoted person I've ever met all my life. I don't quite understand it sometimes. We've all had friends who are charming and funny and a blast to hang with. But at the end of the day, somehow it's only Alec that I feel I could talk to about anything on my mind. I've confessed a great many things to him, so Alec knows my deepest secrets, my darkest fears and my most embarrassing stories, as I think he's given me access to a fair share of his own inner turmoil.
> 
> Funnily, I knew he's attracted to me within that first month of our living together. My initial reaction was spooked and I was a little awkward at first, to be perfectly honest. But soon after I got to know deeper of the wonderful, selfless personality that lies behind that stern, uncaring facade, it dawned on me that there was really nothing to be uncomfortable about ashamed of. I've held his hand many times, and I'm still charmed every single time by the warmth and the strength and the gentleness of how he positions his hand around mine. It's quite a mind trip. As a guy, I nonetheless feel protected, I feel loved and I feel safe, each time as I hold his hand in mine.
> 
> Funnily enough, Robert once pulled me aside and told me in all seriousness, "Y _ou don't necessarily choose a wife by picking the best looking girl, get what I mean?"_  Alec and I were just starting high school then, I think. I wonder what would he have said if I had told him honestly then, that for all practical purposes, my heart is already taken, and by none other than his own son.
> 
> I think Robert suspected of his own son, despite all the safeguards Alec had so carefully constructed in his youth, all the dates and ambiguous talk at the dinner table, the pronoun games he was so fond of employing. One year later, when Alec and I were sophomores, Robert and I had the occasion for another private talk one night after dinner, where he asked me out of the blue if Alec had been taking good care of himself, and if I would be there to protect and shelter him should the need arises.
> 
> I nodded solemnly at him, and proceeded to invoke the Shadowhunter pledge, the sign of the cross, which rather took him aback, as I pledged on my honor and my life that I would protect Alec from any harm or abuse to the best of my abilities. It took him a few seconds to recover his composure, after which he only muttered, "Only Michael, who was my parabatai, had once made me that same pledge." He let out a small sigh, placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder, and turned away to leave. "You're a good man, Jace. Do take care of him for me," said he without turning his back as he walked away.
> 
> And so let God now be my witness, that is all that I have been trying to do to this day.

 

 

 

***

 

 


	24. Metastasis

Let it not be said of me, later after we were both gone, that I did nothing as Jace laid dying beside me. In truth, I had tried all and everything I could to try to save us both. But radiation from the ill-fated forging of the Seraph blade underwater had fast-tracked cancer growths that would normally take a lifetime to overcome a living host. Here we were, a pair of eighteen year old boys afflicted suddenly with terminal stages of metastatic cancer ravaging our bodies, all while stranded impossibly far from any medical help. There is really nothing, nothing at all, in our arsenal of Runes that could help us combat a disease of this magnitude.

If fact, let me elaborate a little more about this, for cancers are really not diseases of the young. True, it _may_  begin to fester in a body undetected as early as our teens and twenties, but cancers are generally excruciatingly slow diseases. A baby cancer is born whenever a malignant random error occurs during the copying of DNA, as a new cell is created in the body. All in all, there are some trillions of cells within every living body, which all have to be constantly replenished as our old cells die out. It is said that the human body replaces itself every 7 years. Atom by atom, we are not the same person as we were 7 years ago.

The reality is, small random errors are generated frequently enough during this constant mega-scale rejuvenation process, simply due to the sheer number of new cells produced. After all, try producing 1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion) iphones without a single defect in any one of the products. Worse, any newly defective phones might even look the same, and even function correctly for some time, before suddenly dying, or worse blow up, at some time in the future.   

In fact, the situation is even worse in the body, for these defective cells will in turn generate new daughter cells with the same flaws within our body. Thus, one single defective cell can reproduce itself into 1,000 copies, and then into 1,000,000 copies exponentially. Normally, this process takes up many years and decades to be lethal to the occupant of the body. Which is really why a cancer diagnosis is usually discovered late in the 60s and 70s onwards of a person's life.

But live long enough, say to 100 or 200, and even assuming a perfect cardiovascular (heart) and neurological (brain) health, in the end, some type of cancer or another will eventually overwhelm any living person. Cancers start very very small, it is true, but in later stages of the disease, it will have acquired enough offsprings to infect other organs in far away parts of the body. This is called metastasis, when an abnormal growth which originates from an area of the chest, for example, then migrates to unrelated organs like the liver or the lungs, infecting them as well. 

Clearing the body of all malignant cancer cells is very difficult, because our entire body is connected via a single massive highway where blood and nutrients must necessarily pass unhindered. Decades as well as huge sums of money have been invested by big pharma in pursuit of a cure for cancers, with varying success. Every single occurrence of cancer, by its random nature, starts with a different defective DNA. From then on, every single progression of that cancer would have taken a unique, different path towards infesting the host body. How does one develop a treatment for a disease that is unique and different in every single patient?

Well, for that matter, we might suppose that a big metropolitan city is overwhelmed by street gangs that terrorize the public and hinder proper functionings of the city.

Would demolishing entire blocks of buildings where large presences of gang members are detected (ie. surgery) solve the matter entirely? Perhaps not, as many innocent citizens also perish along with the carnage, perhaps causing an even bigger failure in the proper functioning of the city. It is also rather unlikely that we can take out every single gang member in this way.

Would poisoning the city's entire water supply instead (ie. chemotherapy) solve the matter? Possibly not either, as ordinary law-abiding citizens also die by the masses, in addition to the evil gang members targeted in the first place. What about firing laser canons from the sky (ie. radiation therapy) aiming for clusters of gang members? I wouldn't hold my breath on that.

Perhaps the most effective manner of dealing with this infestation is through specially trained teams of Navy SEALs who patrol the city intelligently rooting out problems and following clues leading to the perpetrators, then taking them out while safely letting off the surrounding citizens unharmed. Immunotherapy, genetic medicine, nanotechnology and others are pointing us to a new brave era of precision medicine.

That is, if mass hysteria surrounding scientists accidentally opening a black hole that'll swallow up the earth, or moral and religious push-back against anything genetic as interfering with nature, hasn't preemptively killed those budding areas of research before they reach maturity. Of course, seeing how we spend 100 times as much on shoes every year than the entire world's budget for cancer research, I'd also say that our priorities are quite obvious in this matter.

In any case, none of it would matter to Jace and I. Ten years, a hundred years, it would still be too late for us. The least I could do for him was to manage his pain, as well as my own, as our bodies wound down their course. The _Iratze_ rune is perfect for that; perhaps it is the greatest of gifts the angel Raziel has seen fit to bestow on us Shadowhunters' tumultuous lives in this world. Take pain away when it becomes unbearable, by all means, but I say: do not treat for the sake of treating. Sometimes, enough is enough.

 

 

***

  

<http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die/ideas/nexus/>

  

 


	25. 11 Miles

As days went by, and never a rescue came, Jace and I talked to one another less and less. We both retreated inwards, each into his own inner sanctum of thoughts. We somehow got less and less interested about affairs in this mortal world. It wasn't a form of rejection in the slightest of my love and attachment to this man I held most dear to me; it was simply the profound realization of how alone we all truly are, in the end. We came into this world alone. We leave this world alone.

I slumbered more and more as time passed by, as I felt my bodily functions deteriorate. A persistent dull ache had begun emanating from the left side of my chest, and my voice got alarmingly hoarser each passing day. Jace himself was in even worse shape than I. He could barely move, and needed my help constantly with sitting up, swallowing food or drinking, and relieving himself. If any of this was humiliating to him, he who had so often in the past assumed the role of Apollo, the Golden Boy, in all his undertakings, Jace showed no signs of it in his outward demeanor. He was always polite to a fault, thanking me graciously each time for my care and offering to help me with what he could, whenever he sensed me in any great discomfort.   

One night, or day, it mattered not in this perpetual underground darkness that engulfed us night and day, as I wrestled continuously with hallucinations upon hallucinations as were common with people approaching their final days of life, I dreamed of my long dead grandfather Elijah sitting pleasantly on a rocking chair in the corner of the cave, just out of my reach, recounting to me about his new life and other sanguine stories from the other side. He told me how my grandmother Marie and him had been waiting so very long to welcome me in joining them.

I lost all appetite for food soon afterwards, another very clear telltale sign of approaching death, and so I closed my eyes to ready myself for whatever awaited me next. _Eleven_ miles. Only _eleven_ miles, my thoughts suddenly ran.

I felt Jace shaking me weakly with his arm. I drowsily came through and heard me telling me over and over: " _Eleven miles, Alec, only eleven miles!"_

I placed my hand atop his, and stroked it as gently as I could. Our fingers interlocked. I sighed, and felt him sighing back. " _It_ _'s nothing, Jace... just a hallucination"_ , I tried to console him.

But Jace shook his head, and I realized that his eyes seemed uncharacteristically alert and vigilant. This was it, that final spark before the end, I immediately realized, like a nearly spent candle that out of desperation burned furiously for a while, before extinguishing its flames forever more. 

 _"Captain Robert Falcon Scott! The race for Antartica. Do you remember?"_ he pestered, as if it was something of the utmost urgency, breathless as an angel. 

I tried to recall what I could. " _Yes, I remember"_ , I told him tentatively. We had read the journals of Captain Scott of the Antartic for history a couple years back, and I remembered working on a group presentation with Jace recounting the Captain's fatal expedition to reach the South Pole. It was during the golden age of polar exploration, when no man had ever set foot on the Southernmost point at the center of Antartica. Captain Scott of the great British Empire had led a team of explorers hoping to be the first to reach the South Pole. They had first managed to reach the edge of the massive Antartic continent following a long sea voyage from Europe, then immediately setting out on a long marathon trek of nearly three months on skis and on foot, before finally reaching the Pole. 

To their great dismay, a separate team lead by Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, had _already_ reached the South Pole only some five weeks earlier before them. Defeated, Captain Scott led the long exhausting trek home in great dismay. Disaster struck the unlucky team again and again on their way back. One by one, members of the expedition team succumbed mysteriously to far more than their usual share of accidents and falls along the way. The last three remaining team members, including Captain Scott, having ran out of food, thus decided to set up camp, which would turn out to be their death camp, merely 11 miles away from a fully-stocked food depot. 

What was truly poignant was Captain Scott's final diary entry, which was only found many months later by rescue teams who discovered the three men frozen and dead in their own tent: _"Everyday we had been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of our tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write anymore. Last entry: for God's sake look after our people."_

Jace turned his head facing me with some difficulty, as if battling great pain. _"They should have tried to make that final dash of eleven miles!"_ he exclaimed. _"They might not make it after all. But what's the worst that could happen, right?"_

I stared at him, speechless. In rare moments of clarity like this, as I have later seen over and over again in distant futures and still never quite cease to amaze me, there is a certain very deep wisdom and a certain rock-hard perseverance that abodes deep within Jace's inner being. It is a truly beautiful core, a wonderful essence of Jace, one that most people who only know of his apparent conceit and his brassiness never quite suspect him to be capable of. 

I looked at my friend, my beloved, for a long moment. My body felt oh so painful and so brittle all over, and I swear that nothing could be preferable to me then than to simply lie myself asleep and never wake up. But I had clearly underestimated that single unyielding gaze of a beloved, how it alone can hold an unimaginable sway greater than the mountains or even the Gods. 

So I felt myself nodding, for him and him only, and I felt him nodding back. It was thus decided, as simply as that. We would make our final dash back up to the living and breathing world above us, or perish in the attempt. After all, as Jace had so aptly put it, what's the worst that could happen to us anyway? 

 

 

 

***

 

 

 

 


	26. A Stem Cell For Lasagna

Imagine there's this tiny magic seed, no bigger than a grain of sand, that when heated in an oven will blossom all by itself into a perfectly delicious lasagna: pasta, meat, vegetable, melted grated cheese and all...

Bunch of horse shit, you say?

Well, nature actually performs this same feat, with a zillion times more spectacular result than a lasagna. A single embryonic cell, too small for the eye to see, is all that is necessary to make the entire living body of any person or animal. That this one tiny cell, all alone by itself, contains the entire recipe needed to produce a living, conscious person, with all of its 37 trillion cells and over 200 distinct cell types, is almost beyond imagination.

The firstmost embryonic cell divides into two cells, then into four cells, eight cells and so forth exponentially. What is most intriguing is that each daughter cell is somehow able to sense the environment it finds itself in. Say it finds itself birthed in an area where the heart should be. Then, _voilà!_ It already has it programmed within itself to turn into and function as heart muscles. In this way, a single one of these omnipotent cells that we now call _stemcells_ is enough to turn into skin cells as they are needed, or liver cells, kidney cells, brain cells and so forth. Together, their cell line descendants construct the entire functioning human body, where the brain serves as a central processing unit, the heart as a pump that regulates the flow of oxygen carrying blood cells, the liver and kidneys as waste treatment facilities for incoming food intake, and so forth.

All of our pharmacy of medicinal drugs can suddenly sound really primitive given what this single stemcell is capable of. After all, how can we expect aspirin or statin to save lives, when we know of the existence of this majestic thing capable of constructing the _entire body_ by itself, without needing any instructions from us? Whole, living and breathing animals have been successfully 'hatched' from a single stem cell (called Induced Pluripotent Stemcell) created in the laboratory.

This is perhaps why stemcell holds so much promise as regenerative medicine. 

This also shows, perhaps, how little we know of these magnificent, tiny things called cells that give rise to our body and our consciousness. If we can't even create a grain of seed that will blossom into a lasagna, for God's sake, how can we expect ourselves to figure out how a single stemcell can blossom into a full living biological being?

Without sufficient knowledge of the inner mechanics, it will be a great challenge to reverse engineer the end product, say to have a lasagna be more spicy, or to have it end up with mozzarella instead of cheddar cheese, or have the meat be made of lamb instead of beef. 

Can we have skin that's more cancer resistant to UV light, eyes that can see in the dark like infrared cameras, or hair that never turns gray? Can we have a heart that pumps for 800 years instead of 80, muscles that can lift cars and houses, or brains that think more intelligently than any in past human history? Can we be the Q, in Star Trek universe, who ages not, suffers not, and ruler of all physics and the universe itself?

First discovered in 2007, IPS stemcells generated great tremors at the time, as just about every scientist in the world believed that such a thing was impossible. It was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine a mere five years later in 2012, and it is already widely used now in clinical trials involving patients of heart failure, stroke, Parkinson's disease, and many others in 2018.

What kind of world would we find ourselves in, in 2030? In 2050? Like it or not, we live in pretty interesting times. 

 

 

***

 

 

 

 


	27. Parabatai

Alec made no effort to suppress a big yawn he knew was coming, as he stared blankly at Herr Gottstalk droning monotonously. The dozen or so hyperactive sixteen-year-olds under his tutelage were all immersed in their own doodling or daydreaming.

Alec glanced idly at Jace sitting to his left, mouth pouting as if in idle concentration. Glancing at the window, he could see the leaves outside beginning to turn bright green against a backdrop of clear blue sky. Spring was coming sooner than he’d expected. He wondered when would his parents be back from Idris, and what gifts would they be bringing along with them.

A gaggle of laughter jolted him back to reality. That alone was highly unusual, he thought absently. He could have counted with the fingers on one hand the number of times poor Herr Gottstalk, their dry professor of Ethics, had inspired such a ruckus in class.

“Surely you mean they thrust alongside each other both in battle and in bed?”

“How many parabatai does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“One is enough to spark as brightly, assuming they’re joined at the hips”

Poor Herr Gottstalk indeed. In truth, the old man should have been put out to pasture long ago had the Clave not been so short of tutors to serve its numerous Institutes around the world. His breathy voice, occasionally punctuated by his shortness of breath, made for a comical scene against the universal glee and hilarity of the roomful of teenage boys.

“Laugh, children, laugh… Go ahead… You smartasses all think the parabatai is an archaic custom from an era long gone by, don’t you? I see youngsters your age everywhere, and not just you lot, strong as mules and supremely confident of their abilities to handle what comes their way. There's just no way that you'd want someone to drag you down in battle or in life, you think!"

"And indeed most, if not all of you in this class, will grow up never having a parabatai. Still, being as old as I am, I get to say this with a grain of wisdom that will hopefully come to you when you approach my age: you never truly realize you need them until you’re far beyond the age to form such bonds.”

“Well, but what about your wife, sir?”

“Don’t you think she’s hot enough for you, sir?”

“My love life truly is none of your business, thank you, James. What I have been trying to imprint on you fools is that, all this heels over heads upon heels under heads you feel for some girl in the next class will fade over time. Romance doesn’t last forever, you know. The parabatai bond, on the other hand, because it transcends romantic attraction, is deeper than blood, and thus can last for a lifetime.”

“But sir, I just can’t picture myself swear an oath with, say, Liam here, as tight as we are together. It’s just too weird.”

"Get a room already, you two!"

"Oh Liam, my man - Entreat me not to leave thee, Or return from following after thee." The class broke out in spontaneous applause. Someone started a chant, a rap remix of sorts of the parabatai oath, "For whither thou goest, I will go, And where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, If aught but death part thee and me."

"Who's playing Juliet?"

“Seriousy, man… Think about it... Swearing an oath to always be together with your bro... Now that's intense!”

Herr Gottstalk sounded more gleeful than he’d been the entire morning. “Well, well, well… you call yourselves hunters and warriors, and yet none of you have the guts to ask your fellow brother to solemnly share a sacred bond? Not man enough, eh?"

"But to address your concerns, yes, of course by all means beware. Not all bonds are what they appear. Not all alliances are faithful. Not all marriages are loving. Not all enemies hate each other. Not all friends are what they should be. Pick your alliances carefully, for not only will they shape you far into the future, this is your chance to shape their lives far into the future as well.”

The bell rang and, more relieved than anything, Herr Professor exclaimed, “Well, how time passes today, to think how thoroughly I must have flown circles over your empty heads today. See you all next week!”

Whistles of joy were heard from all sides. The class suddenly buzzed with frenzied activity. Within seconds, the entire gaggle of boys had miraculously abandoned the classroom, leaving Alec staring dreamily by himself.

Suddenly he felt a gaze settle on him, and turned round to find Jace studying him from the next table, smiling.

“A fine philosopher you’d make someday, staring vacuously like that.”

For once, Alec did not feel a need for a witty retort. It was only Jace.

“Coming over to train rune drawing at my place tonight?”

“Sure.”

 

Not two years later, under circumstances no one would have foreseen, he’d asked Alec to be his parabatai.

 

 

***

 

 


	28. When The Beating Of Your Heart, Echoes The Beating Of The Drums

The plan was to march for six hours, sleep an hour, advance another six hours, then another hour's sleep, ad perpetuum.

We decided for Jace to lead our lonely death march back to the surface, myself following as close as possible behind him, notwithstanding his dire and quickly worsening condition. I knew us well enough, even then, my pride notwithstanding, what Jace was truly capable of if only he wanted something enough to truly put his mind to it. One doesn't simply attain Jace's later legendary stature among Shadowhunters through all talk and no action. Some things he already did tremendously well, what's more, he isn't afraid to suffer greatly in attaining his goal; a lethal combination, and perhaps a universal recipe for greatness.

We took only what we absolutely couldn't do without; food, water, and crucial equipment for diving and later for climbing. Fifteen miles of underwater tunnels, followed by another fifteen miles of dry and winding vertical climb awaited us. Should we make it out to the surface, we may yet live to celebrate many a birthday to come, winding down our old ages with one another like a bickering couple or wayward siblings. Should we not make it, our bodies shall remain trapped only to rot for eternity in this no man's land, nameless and forgotten amidst these rocks and dark waters which has never seen the light of day.

We left our sole pack and all our clothes behind, to lighten the load as much as we could. There would be no coming back, in any case. This is it, the final mad dash across no man's land. 

I waded my feet tentatively into the ice cold water before us. It was freezing cold. I sighed, dreading the moment when the time finally came for us to plunge in. Then out of a sudden, I felt Jace's warm hand on top of my shivering fingers. I looked up, and saw the unusual twinkle in his eyes, as he said very measured and evenly, "Will you be my parabatai, Alec?"

I froze, and couldn't move an inch. Was I hallucinating again, or more likely, misheard what he'd just said? I stuttered, "W-what do you m-mean?"

Jace smiled. He smiled astoundingly sweetly at me, and it felt to me as though he was smiling _at_ me, _with_ me, and _for_ me all together at the same time. "Say yes," he whispered, rather huskily. "We may not have tomorrow."

Haltingly, my eyes set about brimming with uncontrollable tears. Jace took hold of my now reddening cheeks in his warm open palms, and very gently caressed his thumbs atop my straining wet eyelids. I felt myself giving in to his caresses, unfighting, and felt his thumbs prodding gently about my eyelashes, squeezing my tears out methodically allowing drops after drops to roll liberally down my cheeks. 

"Commune with me," he whispered. "Let's be as one." He took my trembling hand and placed it over his own steady heart, so that I could feel it beating nervously underneath. Then he scoured for my heart with his hand, found it, and placed his warm open palm urgently over it. 

"Can you feel it, our hearts beating?" he asked. "Imagine you and me, two hearts that beat as one, two souls conjoined. Isn't this what you and me were always about, long before we even knew what it was that we felt?"

I felt even more tears welling up inside me. "I'm ready now," vouched Jace. "Tell me you're ready too, Alec," he entreated.

I nodded my head in silence, resting my closed lids against his gentle thumbs, and rubbed my tears dry using his thumbs. "I'm ready, Jace," I said outloud, pouring my entire heart and soul it seemed into a single sentence.

There was no ceremony whatsoever. Nor need there be any, I think. Crowds, guests, cakes, confetti... What the two of us had by then had so far transcended those banalities of societal norms; we needed no authority, for Jace is my authority, we needed no witness, for Jace is my witness, we needed no celebration, for Jace is my celebration.

Mutely, Jace took up his stele and began to etch the sacred rune of Blood Brotherhood over my bare flesh. I did the same upon his body, matching each one of his exquisite, piercing gestures stroke for each tiny stroke. Just as we completed our ultimate renderings, an overwhelming sensation immediately came over me. I thought I must have passed out, for stars filled my entire vision, and a high-pitched ringing pervaded my hearing. When I opened my eyes again after some time, it was with the most utterly strange out-of-body sensation of staring at Jace before me, and feeling like I was looking back at myself through some mirror. I drew a sharp breath, and amazingly felt Jace breathing in tandem with me. I felt a nudge of bliss deep within me, and realized that it had been coming from Jace all along, but strangely enmeshed together with my own thoughts and feelings, so that it wasn't easy to tell where his feelings began, and where mine ended. We were as one, a shared conjoined soul in two different bodies. 

I looked at him, as I felt him looking back at me. There had been no need to even nod our mutual understanding anymore, for I felt him inside me as vividly as I felt my limbs about me. For better or worse, I couldn't ever cut him off from me from now on, anymore than I could cut my own arm or leg off me. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, in bliss and in adversity, I am his, as he is mine.

We stood side by side afterwards, making final checks on our gear, before Jace gave the signal, and we plunged back into the depths which had so threatened to swallow us whole in the first place.

I clenched my teeth at the sudden, shocking sensation of ice-cold water, but in truth I was bubbling inside with emotions threatening to burst anytime now, for everything that happened that day only reminded me of that stirring, warm-blooded song I used to hum a long time ago as a lonely kid without Jace:

 

Do you hear the people sing?  
Singing the song of angry men?  
It is the music of a people  
Who will not be slaves again  
When the beating of your heart  
Echoes the beating of the drums  
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes  
  
Will you join in our crusade?  
Who will be strong and stand with me?  
Beyond the barricades  
Is there a world you long to see?  
Then join in the fight  
That will give you the right to be free!  
  
Will you give all you can give  
So that our banner may advance?  
Some will fall and some will live,  
Will you stand up and take your chance?  
The blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of France

 

 

 ***

 

 Les Misérables, "Do You Hear The People Sing?"

 


	29. I Want Something Just Like This

For centuries, the exact nature and the true extent of the parabatai connection had been intentionally muddled, by orders of the highest military authority of the Clave of Idris.

The first ever born Nephilim, Jonathan, whom the Angel Raziel saw fit to entrust the trio of Mortal Instruments to, had immediately afterwards sworn the parabatai oath with his lifelong companion David. Some of the greatest, mightiest military commanders in the entire history of the Clave had shown a discernible tendency to enter into parabatai unions, most recently and notoriously: Valentine Morgenstern.

As such, parabatai abilities are — understandably — treated as intelligence of the utmost top secrecy, information privy only to the senior-most High Councillors in Idris, as well as to the individual parabatai themselves, who are rare enough in numbers, but are invariably sworn to safeguard the exact nature of their bond for all eternity, under penalty of life imprisonment.

Following the recent closing curtain to that most horrific chapter of our history — the thirty years long Demon Wars — the dawn of a new era of Nephilim supremacy is finally upon us, and some things that used to be treasonable offences of utmost severity are now treated with about as much harmless fun as speculating about the moon landing of 1969. 

The closest metaphor I could think of to try and explain what Jace and I constantly feel of one another is that of _craniopagus twins_ , who are conjoined at the head from birth. They too exhibit extra-ordinary connections and abilities unheard of in ordinary people.

I could for instance quite easily, if I put my mind to it, taste what Jace is tasting at this very moment. I could sense, even when we're physically miles apart from each other, if any part of his body is being touched, or if he's in pain, and where exactly it hurts.

Now be ready, for people freak out when they hear this, but I could see rather well out of Jace's pair of eyes if I focus my thoughts on him hard enough. I could readily tell what colors he's seeing, various people's faces he's currently talking to, up to and including all the shapes and objects in his immediate field of vision.

I could generally sense what he is feeling at any given moment, and even sometimes what particular thought is crossing uppermost in his mind, if both Jace and I choose to focus our minds hard enough onto it.

Probably what the Clave had tried their utmost for so long to suppress is that, I could reliably move and control Jace's arms and legs as well as mine, should the need arises. I could make him open his eyes in his sleep and walk down a block to the supermarket to pay for a six-pack of Heineken. I could equally maneuver him remotely out of harms way if he gets knocked unconscious in battle. Or we could together co-pilot each other's bodies during decisive, challenging combats that requires extraordinary precision and skill.  

You might begin to understand now, the enormity of advantages that these superhuman abilities all combined grant pairs of parabatais in combat situations. 

Needless to say, these psychokinetic abilities all apply in both directions, meaning Jace for his part can also pretty much peek into what I'm seeing at any given time, what I'm tasting, or he could make me suddenly walk off in a particular direction at random moments, should he choose to do so to me.

Is it scary? Definitely. Is it annoying? At times. Is it a violation of privacy? Tell me about it, once you're alone by yourself or with someone else in the night. 

Bottom line is, it is probably why parabatai pairs are always so rare among Shadowhunters. This isn't the sort of connection you would want to ever share with most anybody in this wide world. In most cases, you won't want to give a lifelong remote control to your body and thoughts to just about any person who comes along.

In truth, that romantic unions are specifically prohibited among parabatais actually becomes naturally moot at some point. Can you really desire someone who is so much a part of yourself? On top of that, would it be psychologically narcissistic to an extreme, to be feeling something of the kind?

What is most clear to me though, for better or worse, Jace is a permanent, irreplaceable part of myself and who I am. 

It took me over an hour honestly to reminiscence, and to come back and say this, but here it comes: I wouldn't have it any other way.

 

 

***

 

  

CBC Canada:

[Inseparable: Hogan Twins Share A Brain And See Out Of Each Other's Eyes](https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/m_features/the-hogan-twins-share-a-brain-and-see-out-of-each-others-eyes)

 

 

 


	30. Of Sin And The First Stone

It is funny, and indeed many a friend and enemy alike had come to taunt me of this over the years, but I have no memories whatsoever of those crucial life-or-death moments as Jace and I journeyed our way desperately back to the surface. The Clave was insistent afterwards that I recorded what little bits and pieces I could remember, but even the Silent Brothers, after much efforts and failed attempts, had to concede that those memories were simply not within me. 

How is it possible you say, that I retained not a single detail about a journey that took us seven torturous days and nights of manic exertion, interspersed with barely hour-long power naps along the way? I truly have no answer to that, only that it seems rather common from what I've later seen of casualties in horrendous accidents, of soldiers facing life and death situations in battle, even of victims of assault, to have little or no memory of the crucial details facing them. The brain, brimming with the sudden rush of glucose-inducing adrenaline, rightly prioritizes heightened senses and awareness in crucial do-or-die situations, over the precise record-keeping of said memories. 

It is often the case that casualties of horrific car accidents couldn't recall the moment of accident themselves. Soldiers might recall only the vaguest details about crucial battles even when they had somehow managed to survive it against all odds. Assault victims may sometimes not remember the time of day or their mode of transport on the fateful day, which to us observers might appear to be some pretty basic details.

Heck, Frodo Baggins might have scowled back at you full of stunned indignation, should you tell him after the fact that he had in fact been walking for all of 2,700 miles from Hobbiton to Mordor and back again, just about the coast to coast length of the entire continental USA. I once even had a single fractured back injury not too long ago, which I remembered now only as being painful and needing many months to heal, but not much else in regard to details pertaining to that unique episode in my life.

Memory is a fickle thing. Who is to say, that, in a capricious trial say when opposing parties had each settled on each's own vastly opposing conclusions on what had transpired, who is to say that one party is in the _right_ and the other is in the _wrong_? Perhaps to each his truth, in the light of his own experience. But what is justice then, if the Truth is not universal as we had once assumed? Might there be more sagacity after all to that age-old wisdom we have all heard at some point (and most likely paid no heed to) — _Let him who is without sin cast the first stone_? 

Those might be exactly the thoughts transpiring in the mind of Magnus Bane, the great High Warlock of Brooklyn, as Jace and I limped back into the Pandemonium, soaking wet with the shadow of Death heavy on our backs, as the age-old High Warlock carried us up into his own private quarters and lay us down on his own opulent personal bedding without a single word of reproach, not for having ignored his warnings entirely, not for having the audacity to come back and seek his help after so much troubles of our own making, and most certainly not for putting his own position in grave peril of the law by hiding and abetting fugitives, or worse deserters, of the almighty Clave.

 

 

***

 

 


	31. A Mother's Love Is

Robert opened his eyes as soon as he heard the wooden floorboard creak. A cursory glance and a slide of his hand across the sheets confirmed that he was alone.

Wearily, he slipped on his nightgown and left the comfort of his warm bed. Seeing no sign of Maryse, he lumbered to the study adjoining the bedroom to find her standing beside the table, poring over a set of papers in her hands.

The glare of the table light disoriented him for a moment. Robert peered at her blearily, coaxing and muttering, “Come back to bed, dear. You’ll be cold,” even as he sat down in the closest chair.

Maryse shrugged, keeping her back to Robert. “We'd better have the disownment papers ready to file first thing tomorrow morning.”

Robert looked up at her, uncomprehending at first. Then his heart skipped a beat. He was wide awake and fully alert in an instant.

“You’re tired, Maryse. Let’s leave all this for tomorrow, alright?” Maryse didn’t answer, but she began flipping the pages ever more furiously.

Robert tried again, more forcefully this time. "I mean it, Maryse! You are exhausted and certainly not thinking clearly. I refuse to speak anymore of this until we are both rested!"

Maryse's entire being trembled. "I don't know what we could have done for God to have given us a fag as a child!"

Robert stood up abruptly. Nerves raw and frayed by the revelation at the wedding earlier that evening, he felt himself at a complete loss for words. Instead, he strode to the teapot sitting on the stove in the corner kitchenette, grabbing the handle to carry it to the sink. The kettle made nervous chattering sounds as his hands trembled incessantly. “Tea?”

"Please."

He felt as if someone else was steering him around the kitchen. He started heating the water for the tea.

Robert ran a damp hand over his face and sighed. “I am certain that God has a plan. We both may not understand why things are happening this way right now, but we should always trust God's perfection and timing.”

Maryse paused, looking at him searchingly. "Where is God's perfection in a child who is gay?"

Feeling the room closing in around him, Robert opened the overhead cabinet and returned with two sets of teacups and saucers and set them down on the table, heart pounding as loud as Niagara Falls. "I believe that God doesn't see these conditions as imperfections. The imperfection exists only in our minds."

Maryse was silent.

The only sounds for a few minutes were of Robert puttering around the kitchen, pouring tea into the two cups and setting the pot down on the table between them as he sat across Maryse.

“Where is Alec, now?” she asked.

He placed his hands around the cup, but he didn't lift it. “He took off, probably with the Warlock. I can't say I'm surprised, given the way you reacted at the reception,” he watched her over his teacup carefully.

“Would you let him know in the morning please, Robert? I can’t talk to him."

"And tell him what?"

"Just tell him what's going to happen. All his cards are going to be shut off, and we want him to drop off the car in the parking lot across the Institute. His phone's going to last till the end of the month. We don't want him coming to the Institute, and he’s not to contact us. He’s not going to get any money from us. And if he doesn't return the car, we're going to report it stolen.'

Robert felt paralyzed, unable to move. Everything felt unreal.

He furrowed his brows, and, with much difficulty, began to construct his sentence. "The Clave has been disregarding verses that condone atrocities like slavery and genocide for centuries. I think the time has come to reconsider a teaching that yields such a bitter harvest.”

"Are you saying -"

Robert and Maryse were both jolted by the late, tentative, knock on the front door, the heaviness of the wood making a resounding echo throughout the quiet night. Robert got up and opened the door.

It was Alec, his hair shriveled, matted with rain water. He was still wearing his wedding jacket and tie. "Mum, Dad - I am sorry about the way it happened. I... I never wanted to disappoint you. After everything you've gone through for me -", he said simply.

Maryse blinked. She rose up hurriedly, still holding her cup of tea, turned towards the sink and proceeded to rinse it. "Now that you are here, your father has something to say to you."

At this Robert felt tears welling up in his eyes. Aware of blue eyes that were now boring into him, he took a slow sip of his tea, buying time.

His vision blurred. In panic he gulped the rest of the tea down and shook his head, "I'm sorry, Maryse. I can't." He pushed his chair back and stood up abruptly, the sound scraping across the floor, then disappeared into the darkness of the adjacent bedroom.

Maryse turned around in time to see Alec inhale a sharp breath, his shoulders slumped in surrender. The plain, uncamouflaged sadness on the face she had held and loved all his life was heartbreaking. "Dad, I never meant to-" he trailed, as if speaking to the ghost of his father who had already gone.

Maryse shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. She drew her breath, buttressing herself as she began the speech she had prepared all night long.

But no sound came. Instead, an immense sadness came over her. A void so dark and cold threatened to swallow her and the wonderful lovely being in front of her. Staring into the emptiness that is the void, she experienced a beautiful revelation that love need not be bound by any conventions or conditions. A mother's love for her child need not bow to any reason or authority.

"Yes, Alec, your dad's going to be alright. It's been a long day and he's tired. We only want you to know, that, we will always be here for you. No matter what." She felt she was expressing something truer than the facts.

Just like that, she thought, the moment of truth had come and gone. She had passed the test.

For a split second, Alec seemed to regard her in puzzlement, his voice filling with wonder. "Mum - I love you. I'm sorry I ever doubted you. Good night." As simply as he'd come in, Alec turned around and made his way back towards the door.

Maryse let her gaze follow her son's broad shoulders on his way out, his body swaying as if to some invisible melody. The heavy wooden door opened just wide enough to reveal Jace leaning tensely against the opposite wall of the hallway, eyes darting towards Alec's in the inherent need to read the outcome through his eyes. The boys spoke in hushed, muffled tones too soft to be heard, as the heavy wooden door quietly closed behind them.


	32. Evolution's End

We spent days within those walls of Magnus Bane's warded sanctuary, unbeknownst to anyone on the outside world. Potions he did brew for the both of us in copious amounts, and magical bewitchments he did incantate too many times for either of our addled brains could recount.

He would come by to our bedside as many times everyday as he could spare, and barring that, he would entrust our care in the hands of a young man by the name of Chris, who would waltz in and out of the most personal quarters of the perhaps the most powerful warlock in generations, with scant regard for his own safety and intrusion.

By the second week of our extended recuperation there, we were finally able to tentatively sit up in bed with less than maximal efforts, and soon began among the four of us a routine of meandering discussion all all sorts of substance.

I had wondered for days privately, to the extent that having Jace hearing my very thoughts and I hearing his still allowed for any privacy between us - but I had wondered for days, what could the relationship underpinning one so ancient, and strikingly gorgeous to be honest, and one so young, and also strikingly gorgeous to be honest.

 _Come on, Alec... Think! Sure you can do better,_ teased Jace from within my head.

I blushed and shoved the thoughts, and hints of envy and desire that came along with that. Knowing that Jace felt every bit of that base emotion only made it much more embarrassing to me.

 _Gosh you're in for a hell of a ride, just wait till you get to experience mine_ , chuckled Jace, coyly I thought.

Magnus, true to his reputation, sensed immediately that something was not quite the usual between the two of us. "You two are talking to each other, secretly, in your heads..." he observed, one day as the three of us languidly munched our congee in the morning. Chris had mercifully gone out on some errands that morning, creating the opening for Jace to ask, direct as a gun barrel, "Alec and I have just been having this little debate... Chris is your boyfriend, I dare say?"

Magnus flashed us one his enigmatic smile, and nodded for bit. "You could say that, I suppose..." He dillied and dallied for a bit before adding, "Though friends with benefits is the more apt term these days, I think?"

"Alec's been having these... feelings... you know, and we'd so love it if you could tell us more, for his sake," confessed the bastard. For once, and and infinitely number of times after that, I wished that I had not taken a parabatai to be my spokesperson and confessor all in one.

Magnus turned his head and looked long and hard at me. "Why?" he asked. "Are you conflicted, about being like that?" he asked, without a hint of ill intent in his voice.

I stuttered. "It's just that, as you know, the Clave's teachings are pretty clear on it... Abomination and all..." I just couldn't bring myself to say the thing out, aloud.

Magnus smiled, kindly as a father or grandfather might towards a lost child. 

"If it were indeed evil, or useless, or an abomination, nature would have gotten rid of it long long ago," he pronounced very calmly.

Jace nodded sagely. "Charles Darwin," he muttered, probably just regurgitating what empty nonsense he recalled from school, I rolled my eyes. 

 _Damn right you, it's the lost art of winning respect and appearing smarter than you really are_ , jabbed him back.

Magnus looked at Jace with a sense of renewed respect, perhaps evaluating how he could possibly have so underestimated the gorgeous, dumb, blond jock boy before him. "Yes, indeed," he replied. "Quote:  _It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change._ Unquote _._ ”

I pondered at the idea. "But it makes no sense, for ones who are attracted to the same kinds as themselves, they cannot procreate. How could such an obviously disadvantageous trait survive over so many generations of offsprings?"

Magnus placed a hand a hand under his chin, entering a different sort of Magnus altogether, one more wise and thoughtful than the outwardly camp, drama queen facade that he had so habitually put on for the world to see. 

"That some part of it is biological, it is I think now without doubt," he said at length. "Identical twins are the most likely of us to grow up gay alike, followed next in numbers by non-identical twins, and after that by brothers and sisters of the same parents, and lastly and least by adopted siblings within the same family. There must be some inherited biological component for such a pattern to emerge."

"But identical twins are only somewhat more likely, and the number is far from a hundred percent, likely to grow up gay alike," I countered with what seemed most obvious.

"Yes, just as children whose parents had a history of heart disease or diabetes are somewhat more likely, but not a hundred percent, like to develop those very same diseases. Genetic propensity is more usually than not not at a hundred percent," replied Magnus, thoughtfully.

I could feel Jace ransacking his mind for more tidbits he could next vomit up for the rest of us to chew on. "Well," he proposed, "even very tiny disadvantages, for example, a slightly off pattern of colors in a peacock's tail, that is somehow a wee bit less attractive to the peahens, get erased over generations of peacock evolution. How does such a huge genetic handicap as choosing a mate of the same gender, thus precluding any chance for procreation, manage not to be erased all to this day?" he asked, sounding sage well beyond his years. I could feel just how pleased he was with himself, the bastard.

"Gotcha!" exclaimed Magnus. "Then there must be some hidden function or purpose for that very trait, that we have not yet uncover!" He leaned back onto his plush armchair by the bedside. " _Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth._ "

"Sherlock Holmes," deduced Jace.

"Ahh, you're the smart one, I see," said Magnus, but perhaps with a hint of a twinkle in his voice.

He had my curiosity peaked now, and I just had to know more. "Show me what hidden advantage or hidden function can there possibly be for being gay," I demanded. After all, someone as old as him must have an answer, or some answer at the very least, to that.

Magnus smiled at me kindly. "Well, here's the rub. We're looking at what may seem like as many theories as there are sexologists who study them," he quipped. "Perhaps gay people, through not having children of their own, actively help their relatives rear their own offsprings, thus conferring evolutionary benefit through this altruistic fashion."

"Perhaps, in some societies such as Ancient Greece, gay people were more likely to pursue positions of high social prestige such as priests and shamans, thus giving a reproductive boost to their immediate relatives."

"Perhaps genes that predispose males to be gay, also at the same time increase attraction towards males within the female offsprings, making them more likely to raise large families, again conferring an overall evolutionary benefit."

"Maybe, maybe, maybe... There are so many maybe's... The truth is, we simply don't have enough of a historical dataset to truly judge which of the theories are closer to the truth."

"Still," he glanced at us for a bit before continuing, "does it matter in the end, _why_ something is the way it is, other than it is the way it is?"

"There are tons and tons analysis on historical events, a most recent one for instance being the surprise upset of Trump over Hillary in 2016. Why exactly did Hillary lose? There were countless and countless analysis too for that: Surely it was the email server scandal. No, it was the email leaks. No, it was simply overconfidence. No, it was the maverick and brilliant campaign by her opponent. No, it was _this_. No, it was _that_."

"Can we ever know for sure? Is such thing _knowable_ , in the first place? After all, if you look up at all those multitude of stars in the clear night sky, most anyone can connect the dots and reveal any number of shapes and meanings they want projected onto that same night sky."

"Perhaps, it matters not in the end, _why_ something is the way it is, other than it _is_ the way it is," he said. "Which brings us to, there's this letter that arrived just this morning from the Clave, addressed directly to the High Warlock of Brooklyn, inquiring of your whereabouts. Why? Do they suspect me for harboring the two of you in my loft? What leads them this way?" He waved a dismissive hand, as if to clear lingering thoughts in his mind. "Oh, what does it matter, except that it has come to this now...," he concluded.

"We have to decide quickly what to do next from this point on," he told us in no uncertain terms.

 

 

 

***

 

 

<https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Evolutionary-Mystery-of/135762>

 

 


	33. Christmas Eve

The Rockefeller Center never looks as magnificent - nor as deserted - as it does on Christmas Eve. The beguiling lights dotting its larger than life Christmas tree - six storey high - blazes on into the night, largely unappreciated.

An enthusiastic group of Japanese tourists stops by and "oohs" and "ahhs" in front of the giant tree. Using wild hand gestures and muttering "khe-lick, khe-lick", they pass you their Nikon to take their group photo with. With an endearing sense of solidarity, they politely ask to buy a copy of the morning's paper, which none will probably read afterwards.

A young French couple sits huddled in a corner facing the ice skating rink below, legs dangling off the edge of the low wall, too absorbed in each other to notice anyone but themselves.

The floodlit skating rink is mostly empty but for a few stragglers without family commitments, or avoiding one.

A curious pair catches your attention for a moment. An old man - in what must be his eighties - is learning to skate, probably for the first time. A suave young man watches over him attentively, lending an arm here and a shoulder there when the old weight proves too much to carry alone.

Slipping, sliding, skating their way around each other, they carry on like a pair of whimsical teenagers, laughing, joking, rising above the hurt, agony and trials of the everyday.

Not thirty minutes have gone by when, the old man looking visibly exhausted, the gentle pair returns to the sidelines to unlace their skates. The old man's cheeks are flushed red, either from laughter or exertion or both. You wonder what is it that makes him this happy.

With any luck, they'll pass by your newsstand on their way off, giving you an opening to ask. In fact they do, asking for two bottles of Gatorade.

"Your grandson, sir?" you ask, needing to know. There is something in the way he carries himself, despite his age, that makes you wanna salute, but you check yourself and smile instead.

"No-" he replies, tilting his head slightly towards the younger man on his left. Their gaze meets, and they smile privately at each other, as if to say, isn't this cute? There's something about their gaze that you can't quite put your finger on, but it's not the puppy gaze of the young French couple now french kissing off the edge of the nearby low wall. Neither is it the easy camaraderie of old friends embodied by the Japanese tourists earlier. It's a gaze of unconditional love, and a smile of respect, familial care, and benediction.

"I love him so much he means everything to me," settles the old man, turning his gaze back towards you. Holding his bottle of Gatorade up as if in a toast, he gives you a contented smile and says, "Merry Christmas to you."

"Merry Christmas to you both, sir," you manage, your heart filling with this beautiful fresh air. Maybe there's hope yet for love, you sigh, watching their bantering silhouettes fading into the distance. The young man gulps down his drink in one go and, shaking his head in mock exasperation, the old man prompty gives up his own barely sipped bottle for him. Something tells you this is just another thing that has occurred too many times before between them.

 

 

***

 


	34. Do Warlocks Fear To Die?

Do warlocks fear to die? Sometimes I wonder.

I mean, sure, being non-senescent beings like the hydra, warlocks can in principle maintain their bodies for eternity. In practice, though, injuries and other accidents usually serve to cut down a warlock's number of years well short of infinity.

It's crazy hard to get oneself eaten by a shark. Ask Jace! When's the last time you heard of anyone not on TV who got eaten by sharks? You probably can't do it if you swim all day long, every single day for your entire life. It's worse than winning the lottery.

But live long enough, give or take a million years, and it is bound to happen. In that same million years, you're also likely to be struck by lightning 8 times, be a lucky participant in a fatal plane crash 80 times, you name it. Fell four stories out of a building onto a car, impaled through the head by a lifting hook, head crushed by Buddha statue, hanged inside a bathtub by a wire, decapitated by an elevator... The final destination's the same.

Throw in a massive World War or Galactic War now and then, where you could count yourself lucky to survive one year into deployment.

Immortality is _perilous_. Who said anything about smooth sailing?

I once asked Magnus, which kind of passing is he really most afraid of.

To my surprise, he confided to me it wasn't so much the sudden accidental demise or heart attack that kept him awake at night. Those were simply rolls of the dice, and something one could go through rather quickly, however unpleasantly.

It wasn't tumors or cancerous growths either that worried him the most. Those took months or years to complete their full cycle, but could still be made tolerable through medication and pain-killers. Meanwhile, one was given plenty of time to settle one's affairs in this mortal realm.

To this day, I can still remember distinctly the orange silhouette of his face then as he faced the setting sun, unflinching. "I worry for the time when I get old and stupid", he said simply.

I had not realized it then, I had thought he was half joking, but in hindsight it was perhaps the wisest, humblest thing a being of his magnificent age of six hundred could say about things yet to come.

 

 

***

 

 


	35. Imogen

To many, Imogen Herondale was the epitome of callous efficiency. It is true that, in her capacity as head of the Clave legal system, many had experienced first hand, and still many more had perished through, the cold hands of her punishing gavel. She carried and lived the Shadowhunter creed "The Law Is The Law" through her very bones. 

When Imogen finally lost her gavel, in the aftermath of the tumultuous four-year long Downworlder Re-integration Initiative, critics left and right blabbed about how she had tragically lost her wit and gone soft in her advanced years. This account is not an attempt to exonerate her. Let us allow history alone to be the judge of her legacy. 

First you will recall how, coinciding with her support for the first DRI Accord, waves of werewolves, vampires, warlocks and seelies began flooding institutes all over the world. Horror stories began circulating of Shadowhunters competing and then losing patrol duties to leggy vampires, ward duties to warlocks toting their precious recipe books, and so forth.

Within a month or two, the general pushback was felt to be too great, too disruptive, that twenty five Heads of Institutes representing major population centers across all seven continents arranged for a confidential summit with the High Inquisitor. The secret meeting took place in the Great Hall of Idris, unannounced and behind closed doors. The NY'Stute was one of those twenty five who initiated the conference.

To many of us who were there, we had only expected the High Inquisitor to lead the charge in restoring the proper status quo. It was quite a surprise, to say the least, when Imogen opened her arguments by showing us handwritten letters, first from a baker in Idris, who ran out of flour and was requesting new shipments a.s.a.p. to cope with the sudden over-the-roof demand for bread. Next she read us a thankful letter from a tailor, who was plainly gleeful at the new flood of uniform orders coming her way. Then from a fast food joint owner, who had been requested a new permit for opening seven extra branches in areas of heavy DRI settlers. 

As with all things economics, it was never easy to draw straight conclusions on what the overall effect of any one event would be on the overall system. What seemed to be true was that, never in history had there been economic growth without population growth. The graying population was a curse that was facing many modern, developed societies. DRI might help to alleviate that, said Imogen. _Might_ being the keyword, she emphasized.

We pushed back, recounting to her many of the horror stories we have heard from our constituents back in our own institutes. How seelies were spooky and unmannered, how werewolves were sorely lacking in personal grooming and hygiene, and of course, the perennial complaints of warlocks not having any moral compass...

Imogen was unmoved. The potential economic payoff was still there, and it was too great to ignore, she laid out. But the public would hear nothing of economics, we cried. By way of concession, she promised us to spearhead the moral argument publicly herself instead, arguing how it was the right thing to do, and something the Angel Raziel himself would have done.

Four years later, she was out. The ground caved from right under her, her decades of support eroded in a few short years. 

Truly whether she had made the right decision after all might not be fully known to us for many decades to come.

 

 

***

 

 


	36. There Was A Time

There was a time when I would open my eyes in the silence and solitude of early morning, only to lie motionless for minutes or hours, hypnotized by the peace that was Jace sleeping across the room, and the steady rise and fall of his breathing. I felt I could not be happier in my life as I was at that very moment. 

There was a time when his slightest nod of approval would send my heart spiraling up into the clouds, when his every chuckle would reverberate within my bones. The way he flicks his hair when he looks at me, the contours of his bare toned arms and the perplexing colors of his eyes. 

There was a time when the mere thought of him would send shivers down my body, when the mere presence of him in the room would brighten up the rest of the day. 

First love is a curious thing. All of a sudden, you feel incomplete when Jace's not around. You feel depressed when he's away even for a minute to get another drink from next door. You can't sleep when he's not tucked in across the room, and you can feel the jealousy eating away at you wondering who he's been spending time with that day.

You would move mountains, cross oceans for him and him only. You dream of sacrificing your life in return for his recognition of your undying love, as in an epic warrior romance. 

In honesty I don't envy youthful infatuation, not anymore. I had Jace, so I obviously won, didn't I? Yet it still scares me a little to this day, to be in the utter mercy of such turbulent, earth-shattering quakes of passion.

In the confines of a holodeck, bring it on for sure, what a ride it would be! What marvels of technology! But for real, it's a tad bit too much of a roller coaster ride minus the safety belt for me.

No offence, but whoever it was who said that the time growing up is the best time of your life, might need to have his or her head reexamined after all.

 

 

***

  

 


	37. Millennium Falcon

The two of us entered the High Inquisitor's office fully resigned to whatever crime and punishment we would be made to bear. Inquisitor Herondale, stern and expressionless as always, motioned for us to sit across her huge, yet oddly spartan, mahogany desk.

"Let's see, first things first," she began without any preamble. "The Seraph blade that you forged down the belly of the Krubera Cave has been thoroughly tested by the Iron Sisters." 

In fact the Iron Sisters had begrudgingly certified our blade as fully compliant, and in fact, of much finer quality than any of the blades forged in the Iron Citadel itself, as we were later to find out. 

"Then there is the utmost serious matter of your AWOL and desertion," she glared furiously at us, as if fire were blazing from within her eyes.

We protested immediately. Surely it's a fantastic stretch of imagination, even by Clave standards, to characterize what we did as desertion.

"I could have you two put away for a long, long time after what you did," she announced, unblinking. We froze. I daren't breathe, for fear of provoking her wrath even further.

"But if I were to apply every single clause of the Law to every t and every i as per the Codex, every single Shadowhunter would end up in jail pretty soon, the High Council and myself included." We thought there was a trace of wry sarcasm somewhere in there, but we daren't push our luck.

"In any case, we have discussed the matter amongst the Council, and you two are hereby assigned a special mission to atone for your misdeeds."

I could feel Jace perking up beside me. He was already enthusiastic at the prospect of another _special_ mission. It's all like a menu to him, I think, where the word 'special' in front of anything denotes a better and tastier alternative, as in "Special Chinese Fried Rice", "Special Homemade Broccoli Soup" or even just "Lunch Time Special".

 _Be careful, don't say anything yet_ , I warned him.

The Inquisitor pulled out a map. We both were confused. It was a map with a huge number of star systems plotted with names attached to each of them, it dawned on me. Sirius. Vega. Rigel. Canopus.  _Duh, what is this? Any idea?_ wondered Jace, startled.

I curtly answered him in the negative, just as the Inquisitor started to speak. "In 2012, just as the Voyager 1 spaceprobe that NASA launched in 1979 finally managed to leave our solar system and enter interstellar space, a message was beamed at it consisting of a repeating series of random noises."

"The mundanes could make no head or tail of it, no doubt", she said. "But when an intelligence staffer for the Clave heard it, he unexpectedly entered a trance-like stupor, from which he awoke a mere few seconds later with the knowledge of the precise directions to the hidden location of the hitherto lost Mortal Mirror, which you know have eluded all our efforts to find it for centuries."

Jace was awed. "A divine Instrument, hidden from all knowledge until such time as technology has matured sufficiently for us to reach for it," said him.

Inquisitor Herondale nodded very thoughtfully. "The Angel works in mysterious ways," she said, almost prayerfully.

"But are we to wait another couple hundred years, for a practical way for us to travel to the stars?" I asked.

She smiled slyly at this, a mischievous side we hardly ever saw of her, I dare say. "We have not been idle all this time you know, young man", she said. "Ever since the existence of the Artifact was revealed in 2012, we have tried numerous avenues, all of them highly classified, for procuring the necessary means to reach its location."

"Walk with me", she commanded. We followed her along the hallways of the famed High Council Chamber in Idris, and proceeded down a long winding stairways. It must be about ten or twenty stories further down, I lost count, before we arrived at a huge underground hangar, which I have never in all my life, and never again since, heard of its existence. 

There was nobody at all in the huge open space, which was strange. The Inquisitor had to pull the master lever herself, which switched on all the floodlights above us. Behold, it was a huge spaceship as we have never encountered before. I looked at the underbelly of the spacecraft more closely, where the emblazoned letters "CORELLIAN ENGINEERING CORPORATION" and the designation "YT-1300" were printed in bold black paint.

"Our team of special-ops warlocks managed to retrieve this, just two weeks ago, while you two were off on your little escapade," she raised her voice, angry once more.

"Where's this originally from?" I asked aloud, quick as I could, hoping to steer her mind well away from our little adventure.

She looked up at the marvel, almost unbelieving herself. "Nobody knows for sure, not even the warlocks who ported it here in the first place. They said they only managed to tag it because it had been emitting a special kind of energy which they could latch on to." I could feel Jace getting all excited again beside me.

"For all we knew, it probably came from a different time altogether, in the future probably, and probably from a galaxy far far away," said the Inquisitor.

I nodded, and felt Jace too murmuring his agreement.

"It has a name, you know, the spacecraft. We found it inscribed by the airlock next to the cockpit," she turned and showed us. And there it was staring back at us, its letters taunting us, beckoning us, promising of a brand new special adventure far greater than any Shadowhunter has gone before. _Millennium Falcon._

 

 

***

 

 

[The Millennium Falcon](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/2010/11/falcon.jpg) 

 


	38. Toolkit

It became apparent soon enough to us, why the two of us were the only ones being assigned to this supposedly 'terrific' mission, and why no other Shadowhunters had volunteered to partake in this historic wild goose chase of galactic proportions. 

The Milleninum Falcon is one heck of a fast ship, but it still would take it a year and a half in order for it to reach Vega, where our mysterious signal had first originated.

The ship itself is about the size of a small motel, with one main circular hallway running through the entire ship. Smaller alleys and nooks branch out of the main hallway at various junctions, designating different common areas, living quarters as well as various equipment and maintenance closets. As might be expected we were entirely clueless as to its armament or defense capabilities, but we figured out soon enough how to point the navigational console in the cockpit towards Vega, then pressed Engage, and off we went.

Now, imagine being locked inside a small motel compound for a year and a half, with no possibility of even opening a window or taking a sunlit stroll down the garden path. If it sounds awfully like prison to you, the same thought must have crossed the High Inquisitor's mind as well, I am awfully sure. 

For the entirety of the first week or two, Jace and I took turns manning the cockpit and patrolling the empty hallway over and over, looking into every nook and cranny for anything _entertaining_ the ship might have provided its doleful occupants of its past. There was a holographic chess table on the common lounge next to an equipment storage, but that peaked our attention for maybe five minutes at most. Jace and I weren't much into board games those days. We were teens, what'd you expect.

It still took some getting used to, being able to see out of Jace's vision, and feel him moving around the ship while I sat rooted onto the captain's chair in the cockpit for hours. I could feel the swings of his arms and the pace of his feet as he walked. It was actually around then that I first discovered that I could move his limbs if I put my mind to it. He was paying a quick visit to the head (toilet, in Navy parlance) enroute to his patrol points, when I could feel his hands unzipping his trousers and, without thinking, panic setting in, I tossed his right arm across the room, as far away from his, ahem... sizeable tool... as possible.

 _What the heck??_ I could feel him cursing aloud. I could equally sense his bewilderment. 

 _Alec, was that you??_ he asked.

I kept entirely silent, pretending not to hear, busy fiddling with cockpit buttons I knew not what for.

Jace sighed. _I know you're watching, Alec._  He chuckled quietly. _C'mon Alec... Hey mate, hey..._  he begged, exasperated. _Parabatai, right? We knew what we signed up for._  

I was too embarrassed to answer. But Jace was good in his own way at dealing with such awkwardness. _Let's get on with this, then..._ he said. Immediately he proceeded to relieve himself, carefree as a bird.

We never quite discussed the incident openly afterwards, but it was a given from then on, that any notions of personal privacy was a mere ghost of our past, given the permanence of our bond now. 

In time, we found that we could do more than simply access each other's limbs. We could, if we focus our minds enough, access one another's memories, even from long before we met. I got to know and love Jace's beloved falcon for the first time aboard the Milliennium Falcon. I felt his heartbreak as my own, as his father snapped the poor bird's head right in front of the boy.  I too felt the perversely complicated, deep-seated love and hate relationship that he still secretly harbored for his father who had been his sole guardian throughout his childhood. 

I believe it was also aboard the Millennium Falcon that Jace got his first inkling of the full intensity of feelings I had secretly harbored for him ever since our first meeting all those years ago. 

He came to me once one night, as I was staring blankly into the vast endless sea of twinkling starlight in the quiet cockpit. Without a word, he took the copilot seat beside me, then moved his hand over and held mine own hand deep inside his. 

It was finally acceptance that I felt from him, and it was unconditional, it was unjudgemental, it was perhaps love at its most selfless that I felt from him at that moment, as it was a love for oneself, for we are one and the same person from now on, and in so many ways.

 

 

***

 

 


	39. To The Future

I just had an idle chat with Magnus over breakfast the other day, when he thoughtlessly blurted out that, the entire human race can be divided into roughly 2 groups.

Group 1, he said, will include anyone born after 2007, who literally can't imagine being alive without their iphones and ipads and whatnots. Group 2 will include everyone else born before 2007, who had gone through the misfortune of having to memorize each and every friend and family member's Nokia, pager, or God forbid, home number. 

Now that second group can be further divided into 2 smaller groups as well.

Group A for anyone born after 1995, who literally can't imagine life before Windows 95 and the internet. And Group B reserved for those poor souls who were used to being stuck for hours inside their neighborhood bookstore scouring weekly gossip magazines, just to get at the latest nifty bits out of the personal lives of their favorite stars.

We can go back much further for sure, to the invention of electricity, of the first telephone, the discovery of fire, the invention of writing, and so forth.

But, here's the rub. He said nothing, nothing in the history of the human race will have so big an impact on life as we know it, perhaps, as the advent of cheap, personal, and self-sufficient spacecraft. 

That space is so _unimaginably_ big is often lost on our small limited minds. It takes 4 years travelling at the speed of light just to reach our nearest neighboring sun, the Alpha Centauri. By car, it would take closer to 30 million years, give or take a few mil. And how many suns are out there altogether? In our galaxy the Milky Way alone, we estimate that there are around 250,000,000,000 suns altogether. It would take 100,000 years travelling at the speed of light for us to reach the furthest sun across our own galaxy.

As if that's not enough, our galaxy is merely one out of around 100,000,000,000 galaxies that exist swirling about in the universe, each galaxy consisting of 250,000,000,000 suns within itself. Then how long would it take to trek across the entire length of the whole universe? Something to the order of 225,000,000,000,000 _years_ at the speed of light.

So, there are an estimated total of 1,000,000,000,000 billion suns across the known universe. By comparison, there were only less than 8 billion human beings alive in the entire planet Earth in 2018. 

Why would the universe be molded at such mind-boggling scale, and with so much emptiness and apparent waste, is not as trivial a question as it seems, I guess.

A spacecraft that costs about the price of a Toyota sedan, powered through space indefinitely by the inexhaustible energy of stars, a matter-energy replicator that supplies any and all items to one's heart's luxury, and a holodeck for any and all types of entertainment indistinguishable from reality. What more can one wish for?

Perhaps we're all just unfortunates born a hundred years too early to have any share in that promise, after all.

 

 

***

 

 Yahoo, circa 1995


	40. He Who Seeks

There's nothing quite as unappetizing to talk about as the recipe for food rationing, but nor is there any way around it, I guess, in service of a mission that might last for who-knows-how-long, on top of a marathon journey that takes a good one year and a half, each way.

The Clave had quite so very considerately filled the Falcon's cargo hold to the brim with our long term rations, to hopefully sustain the two of us for the entirety of our journey. Which, all in all, amounted to:

 

> 100 pounds of dried pinto beans (with an eye-popping shelf life of, wait lemme check, 30 years)
> 
> 200 pounds of dried oats (expiry date not for another, you guessed it, 30 years)
> 
> 100 pounds of assorted dried pasta (good for 30+ years)
> 
> 200 pounds of white rice
> 
> 500 pounds of dehydrated carrots, plus other fruit and vegetables
> 
> 500 pounds of plain flour
> 
> 100 pounds sugar, salt, baking soda (indefinite expiry date)
> 
> 50 pounds honey (shelf life 100+ years)
> 
> 200 pounds powdered milk
> 
> 900 pounds cured dried assorted meat
> 
> 50 pounds tea, coffee and cocoa powders

 

Fortunately, the Millennium Falcon was capable of generating unlimited amounts of water on its own, through its on-demand H2O synthesis, and through strictly scientific recycling of, yep, all waste products.

That ain't very much ammo at all for a die-hard foodie, admittedly, but it was surprisingly manageable once you shift how you view what eating is, from the act of savoring every shade of that sweet and sour pork on your sophisticated palate, to a mundane ten-minute exercise where you stuff whatever number of calorie is needed through your mouth as quickly as possible without tasting, and then forget all about it, at least for the next six hours or so. 

What was _by far_ more exasperating for the both of us was, the sheer amount of free time we had at hand. Sixteen hours of waking hours a day sounded not bad, not enough even, when you're a busy student or worker bee or a volunteer or artist or whatever, but it was truly hell when you have no task at hand at all and had had to constantly find ways to channel all that time away, day after day after day.

We ran in circles through the ship's main hallway twice every day to maintain some resemblance of routine, 30 minutes first thing in the 'morning', and then again 30 minutes late in the 'afternoon'. Jace went about practicing the complete set of 24 Chopin etudes - which I gather altogether encompasses the very pinnacle, the Mount Everest of piano technique - and proceeded to play them over and over again, hour after hour, day after day, having brought his electric piano and a reference recording of the great Sviatoslav Richter performing those very same etudes to pitch his progress on. Thank God he had brought his headphone with him for the trip, or I might have had to sacrifice my sanity far far sooner than nature intended.

As for myself, I did somehow manage to read for a bit, then write for a bit, and then daydream for a bit... but I found it hard to be so virtually engrossed in something so completely that it took over your every fiber of being and your every waking moment. I can't say how I envy those artists, those visionaries, and those Steve Jobs of the world who could do so so effortlessly.

Oftentimes since, many years thereafter, I still can't help but wonder if the true meaning of life is basically to find something, anything at all, whether meaningful or devoid of, to basically busy oneself in. Might it be the Irish poet Dylan Thomas who had put it most eloquently when he once in a stroke of inspiration wrote down:

 

"He who seeks rest finds boredom."

"He who seeks work finds rest."

 

 

***

 

 

 <https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/weekly-food-ration-britain-1943/>

 


	41. Dim Sum, Dim Sim?

One lonely night as Jace and I stared numbly together at those endless floating stars on the other side of our cockpit window screen, Jace said something rather, I thought, unintentionally profound. He turned to me randomly and asked, "Do we even know, Alec, if we've been dashing through those stars all these months, or if this is some kind of grand joke and that damn window is just some goddamn screensaver?"

See, he later tried to eloquate, the first computer game ever made in 1971 was a ping-pong game that looks like this:

 

 

Nowadays, state of the arts visual effect looks more like this: 

 

 

Might it be too big of a stretch of the imagination, to think that at some point in the not-too-distant future, VR will eventually manage to fool all our bodily senses, rendering computer games indistinguishable from reality?

And then, at such time when we have a hard time distinguishing even our own games from reality, how can we be sure that all of this world that we think of as _reality_  isn't also in fact a game itself, unbeknownst to us?

Perhaps again Jace said it best after all, unintentionally, when he eloquated for himself, "Ah well, even if we're not really out there we're fucked anyway, cause there's no way we're getting out of here." 

For how does a _Sim_ get out of his computer box? And how much limb will a dim _Sim_ trim when the dim _Sim_ swims his dream to the brim?

 

 

***

 


	42. Relativity

If anything good did come out of our long exhausting trek to the stars, it would have to be my newfound appreciation of the tyranny of the physical laws that govern our world.

The Millennium Falcon did manage to travel at many times the speed of light, on about 50 thousand times to be exact.

Jace and I had absolutely no clue how the Falcon's hyper-drive operated, but it is safe to say that our physics and technology today is horseshit compared for it.

The whole reason lies in this single extremely shady rule of addition that governs our universe as far as we know.

First and foremost, the fact that two numbers, say 50 plus 50, adds up to 100 is a mathematical fact.

But should we think hard enough, there's nothing quite there that will enforce that this must always be so in the real world.

If a shop assistant earns $50,000 this year, and earns $100,000 next year, her take home pay is likely less than double, due to progressive income tax eating away at her additional earnings.

Now say, a Little Pony rides her magic skateboard which goes as fast as 50% the speed of light.

Then, lo and behold, a magic pigeon who's been sitting on the Little Pony's back all this time suddenly flies ahead of the fast-moving pony, at also 50% the speed of light.

How fast is the pigeon flying away from us?

Common sense dictates that the answer must equal 50% plus 50%, or 100% the speed of light.

But not so fast, first we shall pull out our speedometer, not unlike those little things that traffic police use to decide who's been speeding, and out comes the answer glaring back at us: 80%, every time we measure it.

Okay, so how about now the magic pigeon opens his mouth, and out comes his little pet the tiny magic fly who then zooms ahead of its master at yet another 50% the speed of light.

So we check our speedometer again, and it turns out the fly is flying away from us at... only 93% the speed of light.

What the heck is going on?

Well, in fact these kinds of measurements have been done all over the world, all over the centuries, by all manners of people and using all sorts of instruments. And this is the result that we always end up with, for things travelling at very high speeds. Nothing ever quite reaches 100% the speed of light, no matter what.

Who are we to argue with the universe, and where do we even argue our case? The Den Haag International Court Of Justice?

What it _does_ mean, in the meantime, is that using any means of transportation we know today, from bicycles to cars to rockets, there is no fucking way by which we can ever exceed the speed of light.

And it means that the peoples who built the Millennium Falcon must know something we don't about the rules of physics.

 

 

***

 

Einstein's Special Relativity

 

 

 

 


	43. The Alpha

While I'm most definitely no traitor to the human race, it does seem more and more the case every day that the fabled Skynet Uprising is just a question of _when_.

We've known for ages that cute little pocket machines called calculators can do certain stuff far better than our own brains ever could. Like multiplying 9 x 9.

What tends to catch us unaware is that, over the years, these machines have surreptitiously overtaken us in so many other complex tasks as well.

The undisputed world champion in every game like chess, go, or scrabble today is an AI. That train left way back in 1997 when the chess-playing algorithm Deep Blue defeated our then reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov.

But what the machines have accomplished since then is even more staggering.

Amazon's Alexa is powered by a multi-layered neural network consisting of million of 'nodes'. In the beginning, a clean blank slate of the machine goes through a learning stage, where it's fed with millions of inputs of different voices reading sentences like " _Wake me up at 8_ ", and is shown the correct answer - which is the desired outcome - to have the alarm sounded at a particular time.

What is truly amazing, and incomprehensible at the same time, is that somehow over the course of millions of random examples, the millions of nodes somehow magically learns to distinguish between, say, " _Wake me at 6_ ", " _Set alarm for 10 o'clock tomorrow_ ", " _Wake me up in seven hours_ ", and millions other variations in wordings.

This is a truly spooky spooky method of learning, for if we were to pick out one single node apart from that million others like it within the multi-layered neural net, could we ever say to ourselves, "What does this node do? What does it represent?" We couldn't. Not even their own handlers, experts in their own right, while marveling at solutions which these deep learning algorithms regularly come up with, not even them could understand a thing of the reasoning behind why their neural net came out with the decisions it did.

Face ID can recognize any face within fractions of a millisecond using a similar deep learning algorithm. Google's chess-playing machine, the AlphaZero, learned chess from scratch in under 4 hours - no human interventions at all - solely by playing against itself, and then proceeded to easily beat every single human and computer chess champion in the entire world. All in under 4 hours.

Isn't that amazing? Or slightly terrifying?

That was of course way back in... 2017. Of course, Google immediately set the AlphaZero onto other more worthwhile tasks.

One year later... in 2018, the same engine again defeated scientists all over the planet in solving the famously difficult problem of prediction the ways a protein will fold in 3-dimensions space. It broke past legions of world class biologists from Harvard and other top institutions, many of whom had thought and researched the problem for many _decades_.

What other grand Godly solutions can AI bring to other pertinent problems plaguing our world - global warming, society and goverment, law and order?

And what if its best-computed solution is to exterminate the human race?

 

 

***

 

 

[In Just 4 Hours, Google's AI Mastered All The Chess Knowledge in History](https://www.sciencealert.com/it-took-4-hours-google-s-ai-world-s-best-chess-player-deepmind-alphazero)

 

 

 

 


	44. Trapped

One starry night, well into our fourth month aboard the Millennium Falcon, it thudded out of hyper-light speed, sudden as the crack of rifle.

We felt ginormous quakings from under our feet, as if two immense metal objects were at loggerheads. They screeched furiously and hammered at each other again and again, until finally we felt something gargantuan snapped, somewhere.

Then the cabin lights went out, and all that was left was silence.

I felt something crawling on my chest in the dark. I panicked, and would have shrieked out loud, had I not realized in time that it was only Jace. He had reached out his arm and placed his open palm close against my chest, as if I were something to be protected. I felt all warm inside and was moved beyond words, but said nothing of it nevertheless. 

There were multiple torches on the ready on either sides of the cockpit, we had noticed months ago. It should have been enough of a bad omen, with hindsight. Quickly, we took a torch each and stood up to investigate, only to find the cockpit door behind us locked tightly shut. 

We tried prying it open with all our might, me pulling on one side while Jace tugged on the other side. The door did not budge a ounce.

Jace had once seen the inner guts of such doors. He claimed a metal pin the length of a baseball bat behind the door was what prevented it from opening. So we kicked and kicked at the middle left section of the door-face, hoping to bend that restrictor enough for us to scrape by.

We gave it our best kicks for an hour or two, to little avail. There was a sizeable dent on the left door by now, and yet still it wouldn't budge.

We searched every inch along the edges of the metal doorframe surrounding it. There were no screws and openings of any kind.

In other words, we were screwed.

That scared the daylight out of Jace and I. We laid back down on our cockpit chairs to calm ourselves. I knew deep down what it meant for us. Nothing good would come out of this. Even if we somehow managed to get the door opened, we were doomed to spend the rest of our lives plodding in aimless limbo, wasting away in silence amidst lonely distant stars, neither here nor there.

Then Jace accidentally kicked open a compartment under his dashboard. A roll of papers fell out on top of his feet. He picked it up, then turned to me and grinned. "If ever again I doubted that the Angel is always with us, always remind me of this moment, Alec," he said.

I picked up those papers myself, and read it for myself: "YT-1300 S.N.492727ZED Scheduled Maintenance Manual". 

Huh.

"Let's get down to work!" commanded Jace, excitedly. For once, I was glad to follow his lead. Jace, Jace, Jace... My commander. I could live with that, I realized.

 

 

***

 

 

<https://schmelevator.wordpress.com/2019/02/04/elevators-designed-to-trap/>

 

 


	45. The Joy Of Maintenance

Prior to our fateful trip to the distant stars, I have never recalled, not once, of myself getting all excited when something broke down.

Sure, institute computers did funny things from time to time, but hey, that's what tech support is for, isn't it?

The NY'Stute fleet of seventy-five Chevrolet sedans also broke down now and then, to be sure. In that case, we'd simply phone in the Alicante Automobile Association (AAA) Roadside Assistance service, whose Gold-Star service pledge has always been to portal to any location within a five-minutes time frame, complete with replacement sedan and a full tank, so Shadowhunter agents could get on with our missions uninterrupted.

Not to mention, when my two-year-old phone acted all weird one summer, Jace and I took it as a sign from God to get myself onto the latest model, Retina Display and all.

This is the _exact_ kind of attitude that will get us all _killed_  — as I've told my children and grandchildren again and again — in an emergency.

For Jace and I would have taken a billion years and then some, before we would have guessed what the right solution to our deadly dooms-door problem was.

Luckily, the Maintenance Manual had the ABC's pretty much spelt out, and numbered, for us monkeys to perform. It goes like:  

    

> 1\. Unscrew the captain's chair from the deck floor, making sure to get all 17 screws holding it firmly down.
> 
> 2\. Remove the chair and place it comfortably out of the way.
> 
> 3\. This will reveal a maintenance hatch located right under the captain's chair.
> 
> 4\. Reach inside the hatch and stretch your forearm further back. Feel for a knob-like handle just out of view towards the back of the service compartment.
> 
> 5\. Turn the knob manually, which will pneumatically (by force of air pressure) open the door inch by inch.
> 
> 6\. Keep on turning, as it takes approximately 30 turns just to move a single inch of the sliding door.
> 
> 7\. Close the hatch, and replace the captain's chair, making sure all 17 screws are tightened well, to avoid further mishaps down the galactic highway.

 

Like such, we went through the Millennium Falcon's entire system one by one, following every step and every instruction on the manual. There was a well-stocked maintenance deck one level below our living quarters, where luckily spare parts of all shapes and sizes were stocked.

It took us three weeks working day and night, sleeping for as little as four hours at a time, but we did it.

Twenty days exactly since the ship dropped us like a hot potato in the middle of nowhere, Jace and I together cusp our hands on the Engage button in the cockpit, and then we pushed. That familiar whoosh came over our ears, our legs gave out for a second, and it dawned on us that we had finally succeeded in our efforts. The Millennium Falcon was flying again at last at hyper-light speed!

Not bad for a couple of idiots who knew nothing at first of aircraft maintenance, no?

As I like to say again and again to young lads and lasses at the institute today, you wouldn't know it till you feel it - that special joy of maintenance.

 

 

 

***

  

 

 


	46. Playing Doctor

My darkest days aboard the Millennium Falcon actually came about after Jace complained of nausea and pain around his stomach one evening. He made light of it as usual, of course, and assured me that the best cure of any malady is simply to get to bed early and sleep it off.

Except he didn't. I found him the next morning sweating in 105°F high fever, moaning plaintively every now and then about pain on his torso. 

I got him what painkillers and antibiotics I could from the ship's hold for a couple of days, only to see his condition got worse and worse. He could barely eat or drink by the fifth day, and was bedridden pretty much all day and night.

We concluded later that he was suffering from a case of _appendicitis,_ which is a dangerous, life-threatening case of inflammation of the appendix.

It was imperative then that I remove his blocked appendix as soon as possible. Through surgery. By myself.

The Falcon did have a surgical table and operating room cordoned off one tail-end of its round circular hallway. I checked for the tools I needed, which indeed were all there. Of course the bigger fool was my knowing absolutely nothing about a surgical procedure which might just save the life of my own parabatai.

Jace mentioned how he once saw the holographic game board on recreation lounge of the ship also displaying medical training simulator options. I sprinted over to the station and searched like my very life depended on it. Finally, there it was, under " _Laparoscopic Surgery For Appendectomy: For Learners_ ". 

I binged myself in desperation and played through all the various simulated surgeries over and over for two days, learning through trial and error, but not daring to take a day more for fear of Jace's life hanging on the balance. 

On the third day, I went over to Jace lying prone on the operating table. I had my surgical blade on one hand and cauterizer on my other hand. 

Jace looked me direct in the eye. "Whichever way it goes," he said with utmost solemnity, "you know I've always trusted you to hold my life in your hands." He closed his eyes.

The operation ended up taking two hours. It was mostly straightforward with no major surprises, thankfully. I found the swollen appendix with some ease, and the most difficult part turned out to be placing and sucking the severed bit of appendix into the tiny vacuum bag that was provided, honestly.

Two weeks later, after Jace got well enough to hop around the ship as his former carefree self, he took it upon himself to cook up a three course meal for two from just our meager rations, an even _more_ incredible achievement if you ask me.

"I owe you my life," he said casually as we munched down our coffee cake for dessert. The cake was slightly bitter, but I didn't mind it one bit. My chest was puffing out and my heart was too bursting with pride to notice anything else but us two together right then.

 

 

***

 

 

 


	47. Internal Affairs

'Tis been said of a wise old man who, upon taking his first drag at a fine Havana cigar, exclaimed "I feel as if I have been standing my entire life, and I just sat down."

What's also true for my own self is that, having had that first peek under the hood of our skin, to behold for the first time the mechanics that make us tick, I simply _had_ to know more, to learn and see and explore more of what's inside.

I did find out later on, as Jace was lying in bed recovering, that keyhole surgeries can be done not just for appendectomy plus other organs within the stomach, but also similarly for various organs of the chest, and also for the joints in our wrists, knees and ankles.

Perhaps only the brain has so far resisted the onslaught of minimally invasive surgical techniques, due to our comparatively low understanding of that single organ that defines us, that makes us _us_.

I learnt that our lungs are actually 5 completely independent ventilation chambers, three on our right, and two on our left (cause the heart takes its abode in the lower chamber of our left lung), and learnt too that, like what used to be said of the unsinkable Titanic, even the complete failure of 4 lobes of our lungs can be compensated by that remaining 1 functioning lobe.

I learnt that there are in fact some organs we could do without, if we really had to. I learnt that we have two kidneys when we really only need one. I learnt that the uterus and the testicles could be removed should the need arise. That even our stomach, spleen, colon, and of course appendix, we could do without. 

I learnt that some organs like the liver, should it be chopped away in half, can regenerate to form a whole new liver. I too marvel at the age old question why, when we lose a finger or a toe, it won't similarly grow back to replace the lost one. And why oh why, when our heart ceases its might and stamina, or our brain loses its sharpness and agility, why then won't our body similarly grow a new heart or a new brain to replace the old?

The human body is a profound mystery, worthy of our deepest awe and respect. For the human heart alone could pump nonstop for 80 years without so much as a spare-part replacement, while none of our best water pumps last for even 10 years on their own.

 

 

***

 

 

Warning: Gory images of internal organs(!)

Keyhole surgery to remove a left lung

 

 

Trigger Warning: Terminal Disease  

<https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2646571/ME-AND-MY-OPERATION-New-keyhole-op-lung-cancer-cuts-months-recovery-time.html>

 

 


	48. Penny For Your Thoughts

Whenever we're pissed and tell someone to use their brain, what we truly mean is really for them to start using their collection of about 100 billion neuron cells that reside all mashed-up together in a single lump within their head.

Speaking of, how much do we really understand about this mass of 100 billion tiny cells jiggling hyperactively like little tiny brats on steroids? Quite a bit, it turns out.

First we shall need the ability to peer inside our skulls. Good thing we have the f-MRI for that, producing for us realtime 3D images of our entire brain activity, and showing which neural areas are active and which are dormant at any given point in time.

Next we ask ourselves if, given the set of f-MRI data collected from someone's thoughts, could we make sense that jumble of data in any meaningful way?

It turns out that we now can decode quite a bit of what's going inside someone's head. We can decode what the person is _seeing_ purely through their brain scans. We can decode if he's trying to _say_ something and what words he means to say. We can decode if she's trying to lift her right arm up, or stomp her left foot down.

Conversely, can we input electrical signals into someone's brain in such a way as to elicit a physical or mental response? In other words, mind control someone else?

Yes, it turns out that electric stimulation or inhibition of particular areas of the brain can in fact enhance our mathematical skills, or impair memory recollections, or interfere with our motor controls of our limbs, depending on which areas of the brain we temper with.

Thus the remaining big open question now being, can we copy someone's entire brain states into a computer with sufficient accuracy, such that, when we run the model forward in time, the resulting simulation is in fact _conscious_ and _thinking_ for itself? Other words, can we capture the genie in a bottle?

Find out, in a few hundred years. 

 

 

***

 

Neurons of the brain

 

Functional-MRI

 

Movie reconstruction from the human brain

 

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Demonstration

 

Transporting consciousness

 

 


End file.
